The People of Sparks
by Guardian54
Summary: Beacon Academy is a a school for the Gifted/Aura-users. It is also a disguised concentration camp where the best of the commoners/Ungifted/Auraless are taken to be assimilated into the ruling Gifted families or exterminated. Weiss's mother was one such Ungifted in the previous generation. Now, it's Amber Stone's turn to fight, for life or love or liberty and memories never to tell.
1. The Ungifted

A/N: To my old subscribers, **NO FICS BY ME WILL EVER BE ABANDONED. EVEN IF IT TAKES 20 YEARS, ALL SERIES I BEGIN WILL BE COMPLETED**. Note that this whole year's updates will be relatively slow as I play World of Tanks a lot this year, however expect things to pick up once I grow tired of the game and/or get enough tier 10s to fight effectively for my clan in Clan Wars. **These days I write whatever catches my fancy** (also because my newer updates from my two ongoing series and their side branches have been getting almost no reviews but my new forays have been getting masses of them, and I like feedback) ergo here we are. This story will expand slowly as RWBY expands, but some things are already nailed down here… **No Sues will be portrayed for the simple fact that the entire RWBY main cast would be Sues if we aren't careful about the definitions.**

**I am fully aware that the story title is a rip-off, but it fits, the reason should be obvious within the original narrative part (and more so later on). Also, there may be connections to other fandoms (ahem) that you will see… This is like an alternative to what I will make Tiberium do to humanity in my main fics. There is also the possibility that this could represent the rise of Forerunner civilization, who knows?**

* * *

Chapter 1: The Ungifted

_Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late August, 597 AD (After Dust)_

Jaune was feeling rather airsick as the airship approached the primary docking pier of Beacon Academy. But even then he couldn't fail to notice… _Does that armoured chick have digitigrade legs? Wow that's…_ a fresh wave of nausea cut that thought short though and he rushed out in search of somewhere to throw up that wouldn't make much of a mess. _Aha! Trash can sighted!_ That wasn't so much a conscious thought as a vague idea before he leaned over it and began retching into the thankfully empty trash can. His mind tried to console itself by saying _At least there's no scavenging creature in there that would jump out at the sudden acid bath and probably claw you in retaliation… and no trash yet either so it doesn't smell at the moment._

Amber Stone stalked out of the airship door a few people after the vomiting kid, ignoring the looks she was attracting with her… unique leg structure, and contemplated whether or not wearing the add-ons she'd made to improve mobility was a good idea. Maybe she should have crawled or just crutch-walked instead… _Meh, too late to worry about it now. Well… Beacon looks as much a fairy-tale castle as I remember it from the brochure._ She sighed as she heard someone behind her less-than-speedy walk start fangirling about "Sis, that kid's got a collapsible staff!" There was some panting that sounded unnervingly fangasmic "And she's got a fire sword!" Amber sped up a little bit, hopefully the fangirling voice wouldn't question the simplicity and crudeness of Broken Ember, In Amber Clad, and her two crutches given all her worn gear added together to make her about twice as bulky (not nearly as tall though) as the second bulkiest person she'd seen on the ship.

Such was the consequences of lacking the Gift of Dust yet yearning, striving to be a Huntress. Amber didn't know it yet, but making do without the Gift of Dust would be what would forge her and her yet-unknown team into legends.

* * *

_Legends… stories, scattered through time… Mankind has grown quite fond of recounting the exploits of heroes and villains, forgetting so easily that we are remnants, relics of a forgotten past…_

* * *

_GREY FLASHBACK: Unknown Time (Past? Distant future? Both?), On a planet far, far away…_

The bald self-proclaimed prophet who had safeguarded this species, his species (more or less), for a hundred thousand years sighed as he entered the codes that would activate Threshold 19. _This had better work…_

* * *

A/N: Please note that FLASHBACK generally means colour is in the scene, while GREY FLASHBACK means everything's greyscale.

* * *

_Man, born from dust, was strong, wise and resourceful, but he was born into an unforgiving world. An inevitable darkness, creatures of destruction, the creatures of Grim, set their sights on man and all of his creations._

_These forces clashed, and it seemed the darkness was intent on returning Man's brief existence to the Void. However, even the smallest spark of hope is enough to ignite change, and in time, man's passion, resourcefulness and ingenuity led them to the tools that would help even the odds. This power was, appropriately, named 'Dust'._

* * *

_GREY FLASHBACK: Unknown Time, On a planet far, far away…_

The Nod harvester driver shrugged and said one of the lines he'd been instructed to say if interviewed "Tiberium is the answer."

* * *

_Nature's wrath in hand, man lit their way through the darkness, and in the shadows' absence came strength, civilization, and, most importantly, life… but even the most brilliant lights eventually flicker… and die…_

…_And when they are gone… darkness will return…_

_So you may prepare your guardians, build your monuments to a so-called Free World. But take heed… there will be no victory in strength._

* * *

_GREY FLASHBACK: Unknown Time, On a planet far, far away…_

"Brotherhood! Peace! UNITY!" The crowd roared approval as the loudspeakers broadcast the voice "PEACE. THROUGH. **POWER**!"

* * *

_But perhaps victory is in the simpler things that you've long forgotten. Things that require a smaller, more honest soul…_

* * *

_Mistral Continent, June, 596 AD_

Amber Stone woke up to the beeping of machines and the coverage of an oxygen mask. She started to panic before realizing her situation, trying to sigh but not quite succeeding due to the pain that was throbbing… well, everywhere. She tried to move her arm, but only felt a sharp pain and trembling motion instead of the smooth reaction she'd been expecting. She coughed a bit, and almost wanted to curl up due to the pain.

"Amber? Oh Amber you finally woke!" Her mother had jerked awake from where she was sleeping in the chair next to Amber's bed.

"Wa…wot…" she croaked. Her mother shook her head briefly and called for a nurse instead, who helped elevate the upper half of the bed so that she could swallow without risking choking. Amber sighed a bit after the first couple pained gulps through the straw from the bottle her mother held… before she realized that it felt like half her teeth on the right side of her mouth were missing. "Ow's… de damage?" She asked, already feeling tired from speaking.

"…It's bad, Amber, we'll have to defer going to Beacon until next year at the very least…" her mother looked very upset.

"…be okay Mom. I… can wait." She quit trying to raise her mostly unresponsive arm and looked downward toward her lap as much as she could with the pain in her back, probably at least bruised. "How…" She remembered bringing down the Beowolf nest with her usual packs of explosives, only to meet a bunch as she escaped the collapsing tunnel. Bashing her way through—there had been no time to kill them—she'd managed to get herself caught in a rockslide that the explosive shocks had caused. Her last memory before blacking out was of her legs, completely crushed under a mound of stones that buried her up to her neck with another, relatively small rock tumbling down the settling pile toward her face. _Seems like my propensity for area of effect attacks finally bit me in the ass…_

"They… they tried as hard as they could, but…"

"Don't… say it. I will… recover, I have to." She moved only her eyes over to the IV and other stuff next to her bed, then shut her orange orbs and let herself drift back into unconsciousness. _So few have the full powers of Dust already… I must not fail before I can prove you don't need it to be a Huntress._

* * *

A fever set in a week after Amber had begun her slow road to recovery, and one week into it she was a delirious blabbering mess. She barely managed to clear her mind long enough to understand the doctors saying that the infection had set into the lower parts of the bone marrow in both her legs … The next thing she knew with full clarity, she was waking up to the machines again… and, a moment later, staring at the two stumps where her legs ended just below the knee. Apparently the doctors had left her a bit of wiggle room since the infection hadn't gotten too far, but this did not amuse Amber in the least.

…That was with the obvious exception of the maddened cackling laughter that she greeted the initial discovery with, laughter that had devolved rapidly to hiccoughs and finally sobbing her heart out as her parents wiped away her tears. She had seen the tear streaks on their faces, and a pained look of near-resignation at the fact that she needed to withdraw from Beacon, the school she'd been trying for most of her life, especially after coming to Sanctum. _Someone like that Pyrrha chick a year below me would never have gotten herself into this sort of predicament… then again she's a precision fighter, hence why she so trashed me in the last Regional Tournament._ Amber thought bitterly a couple days after waking, pouring herself some of the diabetes-inducing lie that disguised itself as "Pumpkin Pete's Marshmallow Flakes" and used said redhead's face. _Granted I probably lost more due to blowing a crater through the grounds of the stadium to the basement in the final Grim-fighting challenge than anything else. The amount of dust, blood, shredded meat and rubble covering the protective panes in front of the crowd and the judges' box didn't score me any more points even though I finished fastest._

After she finished her initial bout of bitterness over this whole mess, she went back to lamenting her error in not wearing adequate protection on the graduation assignment. Fortunately she had apparently counted as successfully completing it, but, when Beacon learnt of what had happened, they would surely… No, she couldn't dwell on that too much. She might be crippled now but she was still alive, and that meant she could rise again, whatever the means. She didn't have many remaining options though, much as she didn't have many remaining functional limbs given apparently she had some nerve damage in her arms too. That… that could be overcome.

It had to be.

* * *

_Mistral Continent, August, 596 AD_

She had just returned home with her brand-new wheelchair when she saw the letter from Beacon. It said in polite terms that her admission would have to be put off "until recovery". In other words, they'd politely given her the boot. Well, so be it… at least she still had the Broken Ember and her grappling hook for company. She'd built the weapon for high alpha damage and reasonable precision up to moderate ranges, but now that she was disabled she'd need to change her armament for long-range combat… since she would need to change from a high-alpha brawler to a sniper combat style if she was to crash her way into Beacon despite her disability. She'd always thought of herself as a dark red on her own tetrahedral mental view of combat, favouring firepower (red) and mobility (black). Now that mobility was effectively out of the question, she would need to gravitate more toward protection (green) and range (blue) if she wanted to continue on her path to being a huntress.

Well, it was time to build herself a new weapon, hopefully she could convince the teachers at Sanctum to take pity on her and allow her to machine parts for a new weapon in the Armoury even though she'd graduated already… what should she make? Hmm… the Broken Ember had been a 40mm weapon that fired larger-calibre munitions (the warhead sticking out the front end somewhat like a very double-conical mushroom) when used as a rocket launcher and shotgun shells when configured as a shotgun. Amber needed something with a bigger, more accurate munition at range, but which could still produce area of effect devastation. So a sniper rifle as the sole long-range option was out of the question, picking off one target at a time led to too much risk of discovery before the threat was whittled down enough to take out at closer ranges despite lack of mobility. A rocket was also a no thanks to the fume trail…

It had to be a weapon without too much recoil since she couldn't adjust stance as much anymore after firing, a weapon not unlike the Broken Ember in its recoil dispersion… Right, she also needed to move the firepower requirement up a bit further than what she had initially thought, since she couldn't use her old demolition packs anymore, not being able to get away fast enough now.

_So, same sort of recoil venting mechanism, an open rear end, as the Broken Ember, but with a munition the same calibre as the barrel, that means it could potentially be accurate enough for use as a bombardment weapon if I can get the muzzle velocity high enough with that recoilless requirement. Magazine large enough for repeated fire… maybe that would be a little heavy, maybe three or four rounds in a clip at best. Needs anti-personnel round as well as conventional high explosive round… and an anti-armour round too… those can be adapted from the designs for the Broken Ember's rockets. Should I put rockets in the rounds to extend range? No, no that would throw off accuracy compared to simple ballistic flight. Compaction… best I can think of is that the propellant section would be slightly larger than the warhead and that would allow a two-stage launch tube assembly, especially with how far it would have to go past me to vent that exhaust safely. Yes, yes, that could work, but it would make chambering rounds more complicated than otherwise… but it would be unwieldy unless compactable._

The several minutes of mental sketch came to an abrupt halt when Amber realized she couldn't even fully get up the stairs to her room—to sketch things out before putting it into a CAD file—without help thanks to the wheelchair. She was going to crawl up if she had to, but if she wanted to bring the wheelchair, well, that wouldn't work, but who needed it when she had knees still? If she could keep her weight off the still sore scars that terminated her legs and on her knees instead, crawling up shouldn't be an issue despite the discomfort… "Amber, we would have helped you, you know." Her mother had noticed. Amber flushed with embarrassment and kept on going at a much slower pace than she potentially could have, since scrabbling up the stairs on all fours was something she had done often when she was younger. "We fitted the bathroom with some extra railings you can hold onto when using the toilet or the bathtub… and you can use a stool to be comfortable with the sink."

She turned around at the top of the stairs, still on all fours, well, what was left of her all fours anyhow. "Thanks Mum… or I could just stay on my knees and be more than tall enough to use the sink effectively. Well… I guess you can have all my socks and shoes now."

"Amber…"

"I got things under control, Mum. I'm going to Beacon, and I'm going to make it out of Beacon, it's just one year delay, no big deal. I need to get back to work. This is the world we live in, and these are the hands we're given, so I'll use them and keep on trying to make this a place worth living in."

Her mother shook her head sadly as Amber crawled out of sight along the upstairs hallway.

_So… large calibre warhead, check, smaller calibre propellant case and exhausting pipe , sounds better than the reverse… Hmm, if I make the warhead tube half occupy exactly half the weapon's length, then that's a lot of space for propellant there… but that's a huge waste, how about just the rear one-quarter of the total active length… make room for exhaust to spill out the sides and a cone to redirect it backward… no, how would the feed mechanism… what an idiot I am, just make the cone larger than the main weapon tube so it can compact around the outside, feed warhead-cartridge assembly in from in front of the cartridge-cone area, ram back into the cartridge region, and lock breech before the center-firing cartridge can be activated. That might produce a big back-blast and large launch signature, but it will be at long range so won't be too obvious. It'll also be bolt-action unlike the Ember with rockets so higher rate of fire in bombardments. However, close combat will be extremely problematic._

_I'll also need a quick way to escape from threats given the lack of legs… as well as the ability to both silently kill at moderate ranges and to battle in melee range. Hold on, I remember watching an anime once where a kid had a glider disguised as a staff… Granted a large enough hang-glider to hold up my current weight would need a stick about as long as I am now as its spine, but that should be doable, how to make it smaller would be an issue though, perhaps a two-part spinal tube assembly that lets the wings deploy as two unique fans, one front and one rear?_

…_What the hell am I thinking, screw gliders, powered flight is a much better option… rockets might be a bit too risky… Dust-based impulse engines are complicated so I'd need a bit more learning to manage them, probably at least a few months but… if I keep them well-maintained, they don't cost that much to keep running, and it's not like I'll use them too much. Two pods side by side for flight control would be adequate, and my center of gravity now should be around my mid-back, so the location of the pods is known… still need wings for initial stabilization if I need to free-fall and for lift if I want to continue powered flight without using too much fuel, but those can fold out from the sides of the pods…_

"…Gah, so many extra considerations brought on by terrible mobility…" She mumbled as she hauled herself into the chair at her desk and pulled over a sheet of paper. "If I could get a functional set of prosthetic legs things would be easier, but the prosthetics today would probably make me think of them as real legs and expect them to behave similarly. That could easily be lethal in a fight… no, let's just stick to grappling hook and propulsion pack for now to remedy my mobility problem… oh, and of course decent protection to prevent another squishy mess… I can't afford losing any more parts if I want to stay combat-capable in any way, shape or form." Amber got to work on preliminary brainstorming and sketches… her arms had healed almost completely from their multiple fractures a week before her release and she'd gotten the casts taken off at that time. It was good to use her fingers again for something more strenuous than feeding herself, since she needed lots of practice to recover from the (thankfully not too extensive) nerve damage. When it was time for sleep, she went through the novel experience of showering herself on her knees for the first time before crawling out of the shower stall, glad her parents had always had the removable shower head put on a rack at about chest level, since she could still reach it.

* * *

When she opened her eyes, she saw the white hospital ceiling again… _What?_ "Amber? Oh Amber you're finally awake…"

"Mom? What…" she coughed, feeling her throat almost close up from lack of moisture "Wa… water?" She felt numb, numb all over.

"Of course, sweetie…" Her mother looked very, very saddened by something.

"How bad is it?" She heard herself say after a couple deep breaths after drinking.

"Well… they had to amputate."

"Amputate what?"

"Everything."

She stared for a long, hysterical moment, then tried to bend her back to look down before her mother held her down by force. "No… no… this… this can't be." So that was why she couldn't feel her arms and legs anymore…

* * *

Amber woke up and stared at the ceiling, hyperventilating for a moment before smacking herself in the face to make sure her hands were still there. The sheets were sweaty already from the nightmare… so she got up and threw her legs over the side of the bed to get up and cool down a bit… Fortunately she realized her mistake fast enough to lean back and brace a bit with her arms to prevent herself from an uncomfortable stump landing, landing on her knees instead. She was surprised to find that her parents had taken two large pillows and put them on either side of her bed after she'd gone to sleep, worried she'd forget about her new status. She crawled off to the shower to get rid of the cold sweat that clung oppressively to her skin. It was… it was about time to get up anyhow. She wondered what the kids at Beacon would say if she made it in and had to crawl everywhere. It was highly unlikely the teachers would let them get away with whatever they wanted, but still it was the place of a combatant to worry about their impression on future battle partners.

* * *

_Mistral Continent, April, 597 AD_

Amber had decided over the course of the winter that since her combat mobility was effectively gone anyhow she would maximize firepower, range and protection without hampering herself too much more. The result was that in addition to the alpha strike of her new heavy weapon, the In Amber Clad or her older one, the less conspicuous but less accurate Broken Ember, she'd gotten a pair of dissimilar crutches. Sure, it was heavy to carry all of them around on her with the new armour she'd made and the impulse thruster pack, but the fact that the weapons didn't contain nearly as many transforming parts as the weapons of others helped cut down a lot on their weight due to sheer simplicity. Still, she felt that was a flimsy excuse to herself over how she didn't have the martial prowess personally to get by with fewer weapons and how she was now almost completely dependent on her technology to be completely combat-effective. Ugh, if only she'd been good enough to engineer gauntlets of some sort that could do crutch duty if needed… that would have been great, but… no, she couldn't figure out how those kids were so good at making weapons transform.

Her new crutches had a submachine gun fitted into one and most of the length of the other was the barrel of a sniper rifle, both had extendable bayonets at the end that could be stabbed into the ground for support if need be. She sincerely hoped she didn't need to pass any tests for flexibility, or duel any other students, in order to pass school, since non-lethal duelling was a bit… difficult… with her current status and weaponry selection. In gamer language, she'd be great at PVE, but terrible at PVP, which was mostly conducted at relatively short range, if not melee.

Now the time to pass the test that she'd been assigned by Deputy Headmistress Glynda Goodwitch herself had come. It involved taking down another Beowolf nest of about twenty individuals… in a cave located on a cliff face… and without disrupting the cliff. This was, for obvious reasons, a tall order, literally and figuratively given her reputation of "Amber SMASH!" back at Sanctum.

Amber was sure Professor Goodwitch wouldn't be impressed by her loophole-finding, but expecting her to get in there and kill them all without extreme application of high explosives was, in her opinion at least, the stuff of insanity. She had received the assignment three days before its due date, and it had specified that the area was monitored. She had decided to set up a kill zone on top of the cliff (hey, it disrupted landscape ATOP the cliff, not the landscape OF the cliff face!) with anti-personnel mines modified from her old detonator packs pointing inward in an arc toward where the Beowolves' path up the cliff face opened. She'd observed their behaviour for a day, and was gambling it was their normal pattern.

Hence she was lowering herself on her grappling hook's rope, pushing against the cliff face with her armoured knees, an hour and a half after the Beowolves' return to their nest for the day, when they should probably all be asleep. She'd loaded one of her "blank" rounds for the In Amber Clad down with a payload of several pepper spray aerosol cans and a chunk of plastic explosive fused for ten seconds. With a rather loud report, sure to awaken the creatures and make them look toward the cave mouth and notice the new object, she launched the shell and pushed the launcher along its sliding holding point on her right shoulder to her back before furiously scrabbling back up the rope. A muffled thump followed by roars of agony prompted her to climb faster. As she neared the top she heard the sound of heavy footfalls beneath her and looked down to see a Beowolf ascending the rope after her while the others watched. She threw herself over the edge onto the top of the cliff as one of the creature's claws grabbed the rim. Rolling with the impact she grabbed her left crutch where she'd left it and riddled the beast with explosive rounds that showered its flesh and blood over the ground as they exploded under its skin.

The creature fell back off the cliff to the plateau its nest had opened onto with a muffled thud, and Amber poked over to take a look as the lack of a quick thud indicated no other climbers at the time, and at least they'd have had to evade the falling corpse first before doing anything else. Seeing the beasts gather round their fallen brethren as if deliberating whether she was worth pursuing or not, Amber pushed the buttons needed for the cord of her grappling hook to retract into her left gauntlet and brought her crutch over to fire off a clip of SMG rounds. With that the Beowolves were properly furious and began charging up the path leading them toward the top of the cliff. She grabbed her crutches and began doing her equivalent of running back toward her prepared position where she could gun down survivors, and where she had put her triggers for her mines. She reloaded her SMG crutch once she got there, for there was still (barely) time to do so. This was distressing, as she would have been much faster than the clumsy beast before her crippling. The reduction in speed was likely caused by the sheer amount of additional weight she carried these days… even though she'd worked her upper body strength to above its previous levels, it was still inadequate for the task of matching her old speeds.

As expected, about fifteen individuals amassed at the cliff edge where they'd gotten onto the cliff face, looking around for the threat to their nest. It was the last thing they ever did as she set off the charges she'd placed, which were effectively rectangular metal containers with explosive filling and shotgun pellets embedded in the open side, with a thick backboard on the solid side to direct the explosion toward the enemy.

* * *

_A noisy, wet-sounding series of explosions and other noises later…_

"…I think I overkilled a bit. If there's anything left in that nest, I'll probably be able to handle it manually, but it'll be risky…" Amber's jaw muscles worked a bit as she looked past the rather… smelly spread of badly butchered meat, complete with red sauce. She loaded another round into In Amber Clad just in case, and kept the extended weapon on the sliding dock on her right shoulder plate. _Let's get this over with… I wish my crutches were more collapsible so that I don't risk being disarmed by anything lying in wait._ True, they were shorter than standard crutches, but that didn't prevent them from being a bit unwieldy.

She grumbled mentally a bit as she crutch-walked down the wide path the Beowolves used to get up and down the cliff. Sitting near the ledge the next opened onto, she set her sniper crutch aside and pulled out Broken Ember in case she needed to do shotgun work. She grabbed a grenade from her bandolier and yanked the pin out before bouncing it into the cave…

She did NOT expect the explosion to finally drive out the den-mother and other remaining individuals as one solid mass—she had been expecting them to send a couple out first to scout as per typical Beowolf behaviour. She put one round into one of the subordinates' head and took that one out as she grabbed her SMG crutch and sprayed two others down with bullets, scrabbling backward as well as she could with her shortened legs and no available hands. She put another one of the fiends out with a shotgun blast… but the den-mother and the last subordinate had gotten too close for her to reliably shoot both in time with the shotgun as her SMG had run dry. She depressed the stud that extended the bayonet of the crutch and slashed as hard as she could into the side of the subordinate, cutting deeply into the flesh before it ground to a halt against bone. The blade was retracted and she yanked her arm back, re-extending the blade moments before the creature impaled itself through the heart on it. The den-mother had tackled her as that one made contact, though, and her arm only remained in place long enough o fatally wound it before being taken over the cliff side along with the rest of her body, tackled over by the den-mother. She stabbed her combat knife into the creature's right lung, but it smacked her hard enough to roll her over in mid-air and grabbed her when she showed her back to it. Yanking In Amber Clad over her shoulder as far as possible in a last-ditch effort Amber depressed the firing stud when the other end of the weapon was stopped by the abdomen of the den-mother.

The recoilless rifle exerted enough force in the back-blast to effectively cancel the force needed to push several kilograms of warhead out at over 200 metres per second. This blasted a hole through the belly and spine of the den-mother and the creature's grip slacked from sheer pain, giving Amber the chance to try to tear herself free by firing her propulsion pack with the free hand that just finished firing the In Amber Clad. The creature hung stubbornly onto the left shoulder plate of Amber's armour though… and she had to slam herself back-first against the vertical cliff face before the den-mother's grip finally failed. The beast fell with a thud onto the beach below and she had the chance to pump a few more shotgun rounds into the thing to make sure it was dead. Landing about as soft as she usually could on the grass atop the cliff—leaving two shallow circular imprints in the dirt where her armoured leg caps impacted—she reloaded her weapons before heading down to the nest again to make sure it was clear. Hopefully she could finish up before the tide came in and took her left crutch away with it.

Fortunately, it seemed that the ones she took out were, well, it, so crawling down to get her SMG crutch back wasn't much of an issue.

* * *

"It is good to see potential not totally wasted, too few have the power to unlock the full gift of Dust as is… It is good to see you are not lost as a candidate to be a huntress despite not having the gift…" Glynda squeezed her shoulder with a small smile after reviewing the footage and seeing how torn up the terrain on a certain part of the cliff top was. "Granted, you did need to find a small loophole to accomplish the mission, but that's a good demonstration of flexibility and the ingenuity that brought humanity to this point. You are welcome to Beacon academy in the fall, it is nice to see you have recovered so well." _I know full well from your records that you are a ranged combatant and not a close range brawler, Amber Stone. That was about as much of a challenge that I could afford to give you without special setting-up on my part._

_She should have added something like "or feet for that matter" to the end of that second sentence about the gift of Dust._ Amber thought, what she said instead was "Thank you ma'am. I look forward to the upcoming school year and will continue practicing my skills in preparation."

It was the first sentence in Glynda's words, about the few that had the full gift of Dust, that would shape Amber's life, and the fate of the world, forever. That sentence planted a seed of an idea. That seed, like a stone dropped into a pond, started a ripple, the ripple would grow to be a wave, and that wave a roaring tsunami of change. It would not necessarily be for the better, but it would be change nonetheless.

* * *

A/N: Yes, the Broken Ember is an RPG-7 ripoff hybridized with a shotgun (swaps out rear flare for a cartridge mechanism, coupled with a fairly thick wall = shotgun). The In Amber Clad is effectively a Carl Gustav rip-off. This chapter introduces the "A" of this team, the team leader. Clearly, we have a Yang fan here in Amber. ("Wow, can you teach me how to make a set of gauntlets like those so I don't have to carry such an abominably large amount of stuff just to cope with the challenges everyone else can handle without much trouble?")

Expect to see Ruby actually use her sniper rifle as what it's intended to be at some point in this fic, possibly before the animators show such a moment if their love for melee action is any indication. In World of Tanks terms, Amber is a tier 8-9 SPG whereas everyone else seems to be tier 10 Medium Tanks, Tank Destroyers, or Heavy Tanks. In common terms, give her range and spotting and she'll be a finger of God, without that she'll get raped in one or at best two shots if the enemy gets close enough to brawl or even to spot her. Such is the weakness of the Ungifted.

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	2. STORY TRAILER: This Will Be The Day

A/N: **I decided that while we wait for more episodes of RWBY, I should present a trailer for this fic, a sort of overview of major points of contention. Sorry for the chapter rearrangement this represents.** (August 26, Chapters 1-3 displaced downward) Yes, it uses the same song as the RWBY intro theme as its background music. I ask that you employ your imaginations to fill in the imagery with my words as a guide.

Characters: Amber (orange-blonde hair, deep yellow-orange eyes), Nutmeg (brunette, brown eyes, has a slight tan), Krom (grey hair, grey eyes), Talon (turquoise hair, teal eyes), Mr. Schnee (white hair, ice-blue eyes), Kane (bald, dark brown facial hair, brown eyes), various support characters.

* * *

STORY TRAILER: This Will Be The Day

(Before following line) Shows Amber sitting, propped up by pillows and the bed's elevating part, in a hospital bed, staring downward…

**They see you as small and helpless…**

(During/just after previous line—this is the standard format for this trailer's descriptions unless noted otherwise) Camera swings to show her point of view of the bandaged stumps that ended her legs just a bit below the knee

**They see you as just a child.**

Shows her crawling up the stairs on hands and knees in her home as he mother watches, biting her bottom lip.

**Surprise when they find out that a warrior will soon run wild!**

Shows Amber testing digitigrade prosthetic legs and tapping the left mechanical foot a few times against the floor, hopping to the right, then walking quickly and awkwardly out of the camera frame.

**Prepare for your greatest moments…**

Shows Amber putting on an arm's armour separated into two halves connected by sliding braces, then sliding it shut with a click and sealing it.

**Prepare for your finest hour…**

A partly collapsible recoilless rifle is compacted (the back-blast directing part is compacted forward) and affixed to a sliding clamp on the back of the armour's right shoulder pauldron inboard from and above what looks like a jetpack thruster

**The dream that you've always dreamed is suddenly about to flower!**

Shows Amber wearing pants walking in digitigrade fashion off the boarding ramp of the airship at the Beacon Academy pier.

**We are lightning…**

Shows Amber gliding somewhat over the edge of Beacon Cliff, both arms tucked in tight with the right hand holding onto a control panel under a retracted thigh plate, two wings unfolded from the sides of the jetpack. A white pilot chute is seen opening up just ahead of her and her eyes widen as the main chute billows open dead ahead in the direction she is headed.

**Straying from the thunder, miracles of ancient wonder…**

Cuts to Kane watching the camera footage of Amber tearing partway through the chute and soaring past Nutmeg towing the chute behind her while the other girl reaches for the release latch with a panicked look on her face.

**This will be the day we've waited for**

Shows the two facing a large black snake as it lunges at them, mouth open. Amber yanks the tube anchored to her right shoulder pauldron along and over said pauldron fluidly and fires as the snake lunges, knocking her on her ass but setting off an explosion inside the snake's mouth. The snake goes limp and crash-lands a few paces from Nutmeg's feet as she is shown turning.

**This will be the day we open up the door…**

Scene cuts to Krom and Talon extending their left hands to the girls who are splattered with copious amounts of blood, and many Grim Bear corpses are around, and they shake hands. Nutmeg's right hand is shown to be wrapped in a blood-stained bandage and Amber's right upper arm armour is seen to be dented with two puncture marks.

**I don't wanna hear your absolution.**

Shows Talon with his palms on Nutmeg's temples as she stares at him questioningly, and he is staring back with an expression of abject shock which morphs to a look of disgust.

**Hope you're ready for a revolution.**

Shows Amber yelling at the boys and both of them looking down at the ground while Nutmeg sulks in the opposite corner of the room.

**Welcome to a world of new solutions!**

Cuts to Amber flipping up the welding mask she is wearing and sighing happily, camera zooms out to show she's putting parts on a tank (similar to a T29 Heavy Tank in general shape).

**Welcome to a world of bloody evolution!**

Shows a Grim python slithering along then camera flies out to the tank a long way away, into the barrel of the tank (completes flight by the end of "to") and cuts from the black to Nutmeg matching up the reticule with the target they spotted before depressing the firing stud. Cuts to the python's body exploding in a shower of blood and bits just behind the head.

**In time, your heart will open minds…**

Split-screen of (left half) Amber looking over the assembly lines and smiling at the screen near her showing footage of tanks taking down whole herds of Grim from afar and (right half) a conference of men in fancy suits, Mr. Schnee at the head of the table, gesturing and discussing a background image of Amber with a crosshair on her forehead.

**A story will be told…**

Shows Krom looking grim and talking, with Amber sitting next to him. She draws a finger across her throat with an anxious look and he nods.

**And victory is in a simple soul!**

Ruby comes over to congratulate Amber on a balcony overlooking a tank production factory's interior on helping drastically cut down on the Grim threat to mankind. Amber smiles and nods, but grimaces and closes her eyes as Ruby turns to leave. A subtitle says her thought "Only innocence could think thus. Were it so easy…" (the latter sentence gets a voice-over)

**Your world needs a great defender!**

Shows the factory under attack by war-walkers (ahem Blake's trailer…) and heavy combat occurring around the factory.

**Your world's in the way of harm!**

Shows Mr. Schnee motioning icons of assault teams across a tactical display toward said factory compound.

**You want a romantic life, a fairytale that's full of charm!**

Shows one of the assault troopers bringing his blade down on Amber only to be blocked by Krom darting in and blocking the downward blow with his own longsword. Cuts to a greyscale flashback scene of Amber and Krom in the grounds of Beacon, in equipment and talking and holding hands before he tugs her a bit closer and they kiss. In the background of the image Nutmeg and Talon are seen chuckling at their friends, Nutmeg sitting in Talon's lap.

**Beware that the light is fading!**

Illustrates Order of Nations soldiers being stationed on every street and wanted posters with Amber, Nutmeg, Krom and Talon's faces being stuck up on lamp-posts.

**Beware as the dark returns!**

As soldiers corner the four in an alleyway, they disappear in rings of golden light (same as the Halo transporter effect).

**This world's unforgiving, even brilliant lights will cease to burn!**

Shows Kane speaking with them and giving them information on where to find their former schoolmates.

**Legends scatter…**

Shows the four meeting up with Team JNPR in a restaurant in disguises and giving Jaune a small envelope under the table. Cuts to Jaune and Pyrrha huddled with Ruby, Yang and Blake talking intensely.

**Day and night will sever!**

Weiss is seen sneaking out of the vicinity of a mansion at a run and is picked up by Ruby, Blake and Yang in a car, leaving the premises with a small cloud of dust.

**Hope and peace are lost forever!**

Shows a small army flying the AAT banner saddled up in new vehicles battering their way through Order of Nations walkers most often by shooting out their legs and outmanoeuvring the un-traversable torsos.

_***Long music interlude….***_

Shows Weiss confronting her father, fades to black and fades back into video to show one white-sleeved arm thudding to the ground and a rapier clattering against the floor, then pulls out to show Mr. Schnee gurgling, drowning in his own blood, and Weiss holding her bloodied Myrtlenaster and staring at the blade for a moment before wiping it off on her father's white tuxedo, turning, and walking away without saying anything. Amber and Nutmeg, both bloodied and dirty from the fighting they had had to engage in as they fought their way to Mr. Schnee, raise their guns as one. The camera swings to show half of Weiss's face as the two Ungifted end the current struggle for good in the background with two simultaneous shots, Weiss's reaction is a close of her eyes, a sigh, a shake of her head, and her continuing to walk, taking the half of her face out of the camera frame

**This will be the day we've waited for**

Shows Amber being supported by Krom as she relaxes after putting her weapon away, smiling wearily before he picks her up and she lets herself nod off against his chest as he carries her away from the mess bridal style.

**This will be the day we open up the door…**

Shows Amber and Nutmeg cleaned up in tuxedo-style clothes preparing to make an announcement, fumbling a bit with the speech script. Focuses in on Amber reaching for the door handle of the towering door.

**I don't wanna hear your absolution.**

Krom's hand closes on her shoulder and he looks very sad, talking to her with a grimace as her expression devolves from a bright smile to a horrified look before setting on a deep frown.

**Hope you're ready for a revolution.**

Krom shakes his head sadly and the subtitles say "for your cause" as he and Talon walk off to stand far behind the two with Team RWBY and JNPR. The two men close their eyes and look away for now

**Welcome to a world of new solutions!**

Amber and Nutmeg share a look and an angry sigh before shoving the door open and letting the light of day flood into the waiting room as they walk out to a cheering crowd. The screen fades to white.

**Welcome to a world of bloody evolution!**

Flashes forward, the subtitle says "200 years later", and vastly more advanced tanks and walkers are waging wars against each other.

**In time, your heart will open minds…**

Flashes forward, subtitle says "1000 years later" and capital ships are trading fire as starfighters clash around them.

**A story will be told…**

Flashes forward again, Subtitle says "102,000 years later" The plain two-dimensional photo of Amber and Nutmeg standing alone at on the balcony with their friends a considerable distance to either side of them, outside the picture frame is immortalized beneath another photo of Teams TANK, RWBY and JNPR together. Both are seen to be in an album Kane looks through as he stands alone in a circle of light, before snapping the album shut and bringing up a map of Italy with a highlighted installation in southern Italy on the Mediterranean coast, labelled "Threshold 19".

**And victory is in a simple soul!**

Flashes back to present day, Amber and Nutmeg have finished their speeches and returned to the interior of the governmental building, chatting with their friends before said friends leave, in four pairs. Krom and Talon are nowhere to be found Amber chuckles bitterly "If only I could be simple enough to believe we have won equality… we just can't win, can we, Nutmeg?"

"Krom values your goals, your cause more than you yourself do, Talon is the same for me. I can understand… but if they insist on breaking up with us, I will never forgive them."

"They're sabotaging our cause by preventing the free love part of it from working, but Nutmeg, a cycle of hatred…"

"I know, Amber, I know."

"Good, let's get started building the future we have won."

* * *

A/N: That covers the basic concept of this story. Now, the question is how the hell am I going to make all of this happen? That's where the actual chapters come in, read to find out.

And yes, I decided to link this as a very distant prequel to my C&C fanfics, and if you note the timeframe, you can see some of the stuff that will go down in between.

Review?


	3. The Culling Begins

A/N: I write fastest when I am interested in the work and (if it's a continuation of a long series) get decent feedback. My SupCom series and SI Archives/Harmony Shepard series' last updates got almost no reviews, ergo de-motivation. RWBY caught my interest, so it made me write 6000 words in 1 day, similar to my old writing rates.

I have no shame in referring to other series indirectly (as well as the direct things like making Dust a family of various Tiberium crystal forms) given the Mistral region seems to be a salute to Mistralton City a la Pokémon Gen V (Black & White, Black 2 & White 2). **I realized I made an error in Ch 1 as to the initial scene location, it's been fixed.**

**After watching Episode 6 I must inform you that I SO SAW THAT COMING. "Aura" is referred to in my work as the "Gift of Dust"… for now.** In case you people were wondering, it's just another term the Gifted use to make themselves feel superior, sound familiar to readers of my other works? It should be, I am certain now, as to where this will fit in the grand scheme of things.

* * *

Chapter 2: The Culling Begins

_Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late August, 597 AD (After Dust)_

Amber simply followed the crowd that moved toward the school, hoping they had an idea as to where to go, since if Beacon only really let in the kids who waited around for instructions—and looking back she saw a few—they wouldn't have enough recruits. Said waiting group included a white-haired—okay, never mind, just generally very white overall with a bit of red—girl lecturing a girl with dark red hair in red and black clothes, and, a short distance away from them, a black-haired black-and-white-clad girl reading a book. She turned back to make sure she didn't trip over anyone, since she couldn't feel as easily with her prosthetic feet, especially since the rig-up she'd used to maximize charging stride length was digitigrade unlike her legs had been previously.

She looked around as she entered the extremely high-ceilinged auditorium clearly built to impress and not for practicality. There was a dull roar of chatter in the crowd and Amber ended up standing near a rather cheery blonde with an absolutely huge mane who was talking with her friends. She stayed quiet and blended into the background of this horde of Gifted students as best she could, hopefully the presence of the rather… vibrant … blonde girl would help her remain unnoticed, since she had a feeling no one in their right mind would want to partner with a cripple for their four years at Beacon. Hopefully some of the kids from the other airships hadn't seen her yet so did not know of her disability. _If only I was Gifted I might actually be able to mask my presence and just become some sort of empty black silhouette… no, that would just make me stand out more in this rather vibrant crowd, derp._ Apparently her IQ had gone on strike today, she noted with a small smile to herself.

She tensed a bit as the sunny voice yelled "Ruby, over here, I saved you a spot!" And looked around to see who the blonde was yelling at. It seemed the relatively short dark-red-haired girl who had been at the dock a few minutes ago had come in with some blonde boy just now and been spotted by her friend who was waving. Needless to say said blonde boy was quickly ditched.

"How's your first day going, little sister?" Amber was tempted to do a double-take since the two didn't look related. Then again it could be adoptive or just an endearment between best friends…

"You mean since you ditched me and I exploded?" Amber frowned at the apparently younger girl's reply. _Hmm, I didn't hear any explosions coming here…_

"Yikes, meltdown already?"

"No, I literally exploded a hole in front of the school." Amber suppressed a snort before it could form. _Only one problem with that statement, "Ruby", and this is coming from someone who likes excessive application of high explosive to get the job done: A crater deep enough to work as a foxhole for cover would need quite a bit of effort to make, and we would have heard it even from here. Chances are you just cracked the pavement tiles a bit if I didn't hear it from inside this auditorium with the doors open._ "There was fire, and… I think some ice?" _Must have been a Dust-based explosion then, would explain why you don't look damaged, Gifted are notoriously resistant to those._

"Are you being sarcastic?"

"I wish. I tripped over some crabby girl's luggage, and then she yelled at me, and then I sneezed and then I exploded, and she yelled again, and I felt really, really bad and I just wanted her too stop yelling at me." Amber glanced over as the girl's voice got higher and higher _Wow that sounded almost hysterical… wait… that's the girl I saw "yelling" at her! This is gonna be good._

"YOU!"

The girl had chosen a great moment and Ruby yelped in terror, jumping up into her sister's arms as fast as Giftedly possible—a good sight faster than Amber could hope to pull off. "Oh god it's happening again!" The apparently grade-skipped girl—sure would explain her shortness—wailed.

"You're lucky we weren't blown off the side of the cliff!" "The White Girl" as Amber's mind had labelled her said.

"Oh my god you really exploded." The blonde said, sounding rather mellow.

"It was an accident!" Ruby got down from her sister's carry "It was an accident!" The White Girl whipped out a brochure and stuck it in front of the younger girl's face, a brochure that Amber recognized as the worst-worded thing you could come up with for a safety manual, _DUST for dummies and other Inadequate Individuals_. The problem with idiots was that they universally wouldn't think they were stupid, which meant, well… they'd refuse to read the document. "What's this?"

"The Schnee Dust Company—" _OMFGBBQSAUCE HOW THE HELL COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN THE COMPANY HEIRESS HAD DECIDED TO ATTEND BEACON… AND IS STARTING THIS YEAR, AND IS OBVIOUSLY THIS GIRL?_ Amber's mind hit herself over the head as she did a double-take, hoping it would go unnoticed, but judging by the eye twitch toward her by the heiress she was being told to stay out of it or else. "—is not responsible for any injuries or damages sustained while operating a Schnee Dust Company product. Although not mandatory the Schnee Company highly encourages our customers to read and familiarize themselves with this easily-to-follow guide in the application of products."

"Um…"

"Do you really want to start making things up to me?" _Hey, when'd the heiress get that scar? Granted it isn't that obvious—damned Gift—and just makes her look cool instead of being disfiguring like my scars._ Amber rubbed her somewhat off-center and slightly crooked nose and the scars that covered her cheeks from face-ploughing on a failed practice flight. Watching these guys was sure more entertaining than standing around staring at the far wall… and she had left most of her non-combat hardware elsewhere so it wasn't like she could pop open her laptop and pass time…

"Absolutely!"

The heiress stuffed the brochure into Ruby's hands "Read this and don't ever speak to me again."

"Look, uh…" The blonde scratched the back of her head. "Sounds like you too just got of on the wrong foot. Why don't you start over and try to be friends, okay?"

"Yeah, great idea, sis." Ruby extended her hand. "Hello, Weiss, I'm Ruby. Wanna hang out? We could go shopping for school supplies…"

"Yeah, and we can paint our nails, and try on clothes, and talk about cute boys, like tall, blonde and… scraggly over there." Weiss jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the blonde boy Ruby had come in with.

"Wow, really?" Amber was wondering where a desk was when you needed one so you could head-desk. If life was an anime, she had a feeling she'd be face-faulting right now. Actually, she wouldn't mind that if it meant she wouldn't have this level of facial damage…

…On second thought, if this was an anime she'd probably be portrayed as a hideously disfigured bitch of some sort who needed to wear a brown paper bag over her head to not cause others to vomit. Never mind, she preferred her face the way it was right now. _Hey, Professor Ozpin's come onto the stage!_ She noted.

Weiss's fake sarcastic grin had turned into an ugly frown even though she was still frozen in the thumb-point pose. She looked thoroughly unimpressed by Ruby, as evidenced by her next word: "No."

Ruby sagged and Weiss turned away a moment before Ozpin cleared his throat at the microphone "I'll… keep this brief. You have travelled here today in search of knowledge, to hone your craft and acquire new skills. And when you are finished, you plan to dedicate your life to the protection of the people, but I look amongst you and all I see is wasted energy, in need of purpose, direction. You assume knowledge will free you of this, but your time at this school will prove that knowledge can only carry you so far. It is up to you to take the first step."

Amber's jaw tensed for a moment. _Way to be vague, Professor, it might have been briefer to tell everyone just that in real life experience in battle often counts for more than knowledge._ While she thought of this, Glynda had stepped up as Ozpin walked away. "You will gather in the ballroom tonight, tomorrow, your initiation begins. Be ready. You are dismissed."

"He seemed kind of… off." Blonde Mane said.

Ruby concurred "It was like he wasn't even there."

"I'm a natural blonde you know." The blonde boy Ruby had come in with said from where he'd walked up next to the three colourful characters. Weiss pinched the bridge of her nose in irritation at that and Amber suspected only her upbringing stopped her from the plebeian action of facepalming.

* * *

_Ballroom, Beacon Academy, that night…_

Amber sighed, leaning up against the wall in her armour. She hadn't expected to have to bunk here this way for the first night. Though she'd brought her toiletries and such, she hadn't brought a sleeping bag. That was because she'd drilled herself into the habit of sleeping with her armour on unless it was on a real bed, and practiced her survival skills as much as she could as an Ungifted. She dozed lightly until the sudden overlapping voices of Weiss and Blonde Mane jerked her fully awake from where she'd been half-sleeping due to the noise of a small brawl between Blonde Mane and Ruby.

"OH NOT YOU AGAIN!" She'd tried yanking Broken Ember off her back in its usual shotgun mode before she realized she didn't have her weapons at the moment and understood what they'd just said. She looked over with an irritated frown as the Ruby chick tried to quiet them. _Hey, wait, I think that's the black and white themed girl from the dock, and she still has the book and that bow on her head too… yep, it's that girl. AAAANNNNDDDD… she's blowing out her candle stand._ It was interesting how the Ballroom, despite the electric chandeliers, used candles for this night at least, perhaps to give a fairy-tale air to the place for the night before initiation? _…Or rather the night before many of us will die?_

Amber had heard the stories about Beacon's initiation and how the casualty rate for Ungifted to at least be crippled to be near one hundred percent. Even those with the Gift of Dust tended to sustain a few deaths every year… it was part of the waiver she had to sign when applying. _Weiss, there are far greater hazards to your health than Ruby, at least she seems to be the boisterous but innocent, overly friendly type who's unlikely to give you a silent bullet in the back from 700-plus metres away. Initiation is probably more dangerous to you than Ruby is…_

_Wait, what am I thinking? There is no greater threat… than innocence._

* * *

_The next morning…_

Amber could almost swear there was some voice constantly talking somewhere in the background as she went through her morning routine, but the voice didn't seem to ever take a breath. _That length of yapping without breathing should have been beyond even the abilities of a Gifted…_ she thought as she removed her pile of weapons from the locker that looked remarkably like a coffin. _Why don't they just use plain rectangular lockers to save room? Decadence… Wait… it's that voice again…_ She turned her head around as the voice waxed… and found it coming from a short, curvy pretty orange-haired girl trailing behind a tall, thin black-haired green-clad man. _HOLY SHIT it's actually a person… how does she DO that? Maybe REALLY fast inhalations that I don't even notice? I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the faster Gifted members of this school could stand in front of me and my severed head would be flying before I even realized they'd moved…_ She followed after them, noting _Oh hey it's Ruby, Blond Boy and Blonde Mane… and Pyrrha?_

Weiss had started talking before Amber could though, so she waited "So, Pyrrha, have you given any thought to whose team you'd like to be on? I'm sure everyone must be eager to unite with such a strong, well-known individual such as yourself."

Pyrrha shrugged with her right hand on her hip "Mm… I'm not quite sure. I was planning on letting the chips fall where they may."

"Well… I was thinking maybe we could be on a team together." There were several possibilities as to why Weiss used "thinking" instead of "hoping", most likely it was because she didn't want to seem weak as a partner candidate. It could also be, like attending a dangerous school like Beacon, a show of rebellion against her upbringing which probably taught a lot of the art of manipulation and grovelling whenever needed. It could also just be that Amber had watched too many movies and was being paranoid.

Pyrrha nodded "That sounds grand."

"Great!"

"You know what else is great? Me." Blonde Boy had inserted himself between the two with a thumb pointing to himself "Jaune Arc, nice to meet you."

Weiss crossed her arms "You again?"

Pyrrha moved into his field of view and waved a bit in greeting "Nice to meet you, Jaune."

"Yeah yeah." He'd armed her aside and closed distance with Weiss. "So, Weiss, couldn't help but overhear your fondness of me the other day." _Dude, flexing your muscles doesn't work with armour on…_ Amber was rather amused.

Weiss on the other hand rested her fingers against her forehead in frustration. Amber didn't blame her in the least for doing so, since Jaune's pretence of being thicker than two planks WAS horrifyingly annoying to the receiver. "Ugh, you've got to be kidding me."

"Don't worry, no need to be embarrassed, so, been hearing rumours about teams… was thinking you and me would make a good one." _Part one of impressing a girl with an uptight upbringing, use relatively proper language, but adjust for her rebellion level, for Weiss, I'd gauge her at slang being okay with good grammar, though who and whom can be messed up without trouble._ "What do you say?"

"Actually, I think the teams are comprised of four students each, so…" Pyrrha pointed out.

Jaune slumped minutely "You don't say…" He perked up again and leaned toward Pyrrha "Well, hot stuff, play your cards right and you could join up with the winning team…"

Weiss shoved Jaune back, forcing a gap between the two with a hand on each of their chests "Jaune, is it? Do you have ANY idea who you are talking to?"

"Not in the slightest, snow angel."

"This is Pyrrha." Weiss gestured grandly at the cinnabar-haired girl

"Hello again!" Pyrrha was smiling as she waved again. Amber was wondering why Pyrrha was putting up with the boy's bullshit… maybe because she found it funny?

"Pyrrha graduated top of her class at Sanctum." Weiss continued.

Jaune shrugged "Never hear of it."

"Ugh—" Weiss said impatiently "She's won the Mistral regional tournament four years in a row."

The boy looked unmoved "The what?"

Weiss waved her arms up and down in annoyance now "She's on the front of every Pumpkin Pete's Marshmallow Flakes box!"

Jaune gasped loudly and clasped his hands in front of him. "That's you? They only do that for star athletes and cartoon characters!"

"Yeah… it was pretty cool… sadly the cereal isn't very good for you."

Weiss formed a battle line with Pyrrha now "So, after hearing all of this, do you really think you're in a position to ask _her_ to be on your team?"

"I guess not, sorry." The boy bowed his head and slumped pitifully.

Pyrrha clapped him round the shoulder "Actually Jaune, I think you'd make a great leader."

He sounded vaguely fangasmic as he said "Doh… stop it…"

Weiss kept her hands on her hips "Seriously? Please stop it. This kind of behaviour should _not_ be encouraged!"

"Sounds like Pyrrha's gonna be on Team Jaune, spots are filling up quick. Now, I don't usually do this, but maybe I can pull some strings, find a place for you, what do you say?" He was leaning rather close to Weiss.

"Alright, that's a bit too close." She backed up. "Pyrrha, a little help please?"

Pyrrha's response was to nail Jaune to a nearby column by his hood with her javelin/rifle hybrid "I'm sorry!"

"Would all first-year students please report to Beacon Cliff for initiation, again, all first-year students, report to Beacon Cliff immediately."

"It was nice meeting you." Pyrrha yanked her Javelin out as she walked by.

Jaune slumped to the ground with a thud "Likewise…" He said in a defeated voice as Amber walked by after Pyrrha.

"Pyrrha Nikos, I'm not surprised to see you here, though you're probably surprised to see me."

Pyrrha had known the person that had been a relatively short distance behind her when she spoke with Jaune had seemed very familiar, but she was still surprised to find it was… "Amber Stone? I thought you were supposed to come here last year?" _She seems… a bit shorter than she used to when she walks, but standing she's about the same, could be just those new armoured boots of hers._

"Nah, my love for large explosions finally caught up to me, triggering a rockslide and costing me a year."

Pyrrha had spotted some unexpected items in the stuff on the girl's back. "Are those crutches? What happened to you?"

"I don't really feel like talking about it, I'll tell you after the initiation."

"I understand, good luck, Amber." Pyrrha was thinking _If she has a debilitating injury she shouldn't be here, it's too dangerous… what happened to her legs?_ It took a moment to realize the loose pants were bending in ways human legs wouldn't have bent_ Oh… OH, how's she even going to survive this? But surely they thought she could… I'll help her as able if I need to during the initiation then, but I doubt I'll need to._ She felt bad for Amber, who she'd respected a lot as one of the few Ungifted who'd ever gotten into the playoffs for the Mistral Region Tournament and the only one to ever have reached second place. If the headmaster thought she could survive the Initiation, then Pyrrha wouldn't try to stop her from doing it. She leaned in closer and said quietly so Weiss wouldn't hear "I don't think deceiving people as to your status is going to be very good for partnering though…" _Maybe I could help her unlock her Gift if she lets me… some people just have a really hard time unlocking it naturally, but she wouldn't have been let in just to die if she was a cripple with no Gift whatsoever, right?_

"I know, but I need to get partners as capable as possible at close combat since I'm a ranged fighter. The problem is that no speedy brawler would want someone they think is weak."

"What about me? I could partner you."

"I won't burden you, Pyrrha, you deserve better than a crippled has-been Ungifted for a partner, but if luck decides that it should be so… then I'll be laying down the heavy area-of-effect bombardment and you can pick off stragglers that get too close for me to engage with full effect, if you don't mind."

Pyrrha nodded "Of course, if the dice fall that way."

* * *

_Beacon Cliff, a few minutes later_

_What the hell could these pads be for? If they're trap doors, then this might be an interesting tunnel slide sort of thing out the side of the cliff, which means I'll have to bring out the flight controls. If they're launch pads, I hope they contain some sort of inertial compensation, because otherwise the acceleration is likely to break some part of me… and I'll still have to fly._ Ozpin's words brought Amber out of her troubled thoughts. "For years, you have trained to become warriors. Today, your abilities will be evaluated in the Emerald Forest."

"Now, I'm sure many of you have heard rumours about the assignment of teams." Glynda Goodwitch said "Well, allow us to put an end to your confusion. Each of you will be given team-mates… today."

"These team-mates will be with you for the rest of your time here at Beacon." _Hmm, better find a tough team, sounds like losses won't be replaced, nice way to prevent not caring for our team-mates… also a great way to kill multiple people for the idiocy of one._ "So it is in your best interests to be paired with someone with whom you can work well. That being said, the first person you make eye contact with after landing will be your partner for the next four years. After you've partnered up, make your way to the northern end of the Forest. You will meet opposition along the way. Do not hesitate to destroy everything in your path, or you _will_ die." _That sounded ominously like an invitation to kill every other student you can in this race to the North, Ozpin, I'm bleeding respect for you at the moment with those easily misinterpreted instructions._

Ozpin continued "You will be monitored and graded for the duration of your initiation, but our instructors will not intervene." _Hmm, so that's how they make sure it's the first person we make eye contact with after the flight. No rescues, huh? Well that just means that they don't bother expelling students, or even sending them home… even in body bags. Wait, if that's how it's going to be… so this is how they weed out most of the Ungifted, and the ones that get away from this place with their lives are the ones that survived this to be crippled later. But YOU WILL NOT STOP ME._ "You will find an abandoned temple at the end of the path containing several relics. Each pair must choose one and return to the top of the cliff. We will regard that item, as well as your standing, and grade you appropriately." _Huh, sounds like a lot of favouring the rich brats, hopefully he meant to say our status, not standing as in societal standing._ "Are there any questions?"

"Yeah, um, sir?" Jaune's voice rang out from one end of the line of launch pads

"Good!" Ozpin apparently didn't mean what he'd asked. "Now, take your position." Everyone struck their personal combat stances.

"Sir? Uh, I've got a… question." Jaune said as Weiss, who was at the other end of the line from Jaune, was launched as if from a catapult, although it didn't seem to be that high of a launch velocity, enough to clear the edge of the cliff by a good chunk but not much more. The acceleration would be a stress but nothing proper posture couldn't handle. Amber relaxed slightly as it wasn't the launch that would doom most Ungifted during the initiation. "So this landing…strategy… thing… what is it? You're… like… dropping us off or something?"

Ozpin looked baffled at Jaune not noticing the people already being launched "No, you will be falling."

"Oh… I see… so, did you hand out parachutes for us?" Amber felt bad for Jaune as the launches closed range with her pad, the guys should have learnt the first thing any combatant had to be prepared to deal with was gravity.

"No, you will be using your own landing strategy." Amber felt an intense jerking motion as she was launched harshly over the side of the cliff. Gauging the distance to the forest floor quickly, snapping the propulsion pack's rather limited glider wings out to stabilize herself, she made her best guess that she'd fire her thrusters in five… four… three… two… _What's that?_

A small white circle had seemed to bloom in front of her behind a brownish coloured person who had arms and legs all out and bent upward, facing down.

One… HOLY SHIT PARACHUTE! She fired both her thrusters but it was too late, she smacked hard into the taut canvas that had whipped out from the girl's backpack after the small lead chute pulled it free. This effectively prevented the chute from working and she ended up narrowly missing hitting the other girl through the chute. Said girl dumped the chute, probably for a secondary, emergency chute, but Amber had to cut herself free with a few quick slashes pushing the canvas over her… after shutting her thrusters off. It caught on her hip guards though, so she looked like she was wearing a large gown of some sort as she continued her descent, working to get it off so she could right herself without being blinded. By the time she finally got it off a few precious seconds later… the same brown-themed girl loomed in her vision, struggling with the emergency chute that had failed to open. Amber hit the throttle and accelerated, grabbing the other probable Ungifted and seeing her look back with a look of understanding as Amber yanked back on the aileron controls. The other girl used her arm as leverage to pull herself close and cling onto Amber as the thrusters kicked in and started cutting their impact speed…

_Damn I should have installed four thrusters instead of two. Amber cursed mentally as the ground loomed closer and closer at far too high a speed to be safe for Ungifted to land… Where's the softest landing I can see… there._ She continued to pull up while at full burn on the thrusters as they came closer and closer… then rolled them over so that her armoured back would splash down first in the small forest clearing pond. Hopefully her weapons would be okay with the abuse, she'd closed the covers on their holding pockets in the armour before the flight, after all. There was a thunderous sound of water being thrown up as the two skipped across the surface of the pond, the brown-themed girl's hands on Amber's front now to prevent damage to her unarmoured hands as the other girl's armour splashed across the water before finally slipping too far too one side and rolling them over in a wet, marshy tumble. Both looked around once to make sure there were no threats, then started extracting themselves from the now muddy water.

"Ugh." Amber groaned as she saw the now somewhat ruined camouflage pattern of her armour. Yes, she'd painted it under the surface layer of protective material, but with brown mud all over the top of that it wouldn't matter. The other girl groaned too and looked up at her with wide brown eyes. "Name's Amber, sorry for ruining your chute. Didn't realize the pilot chute was what it was at first. Seems like we're stuck with each other now."

"I'm Nutmeg, thanks for the save… I didn't expect anyone would crash through my chute, so it's my fault. What do you specialize in?" The girl got up, pulling out a blocky weapon that with a few manual unfoldings and flip-ups into a hybrid bullpup-configuration relatively large-calibre assault rifle with attached grenade launcher under the rifle barrel and a bayonet sticking out to the left side of the rifle barrel.

"Hmm… my weapons…" Amber opened up the protective compartment on her armour "They're still okay, let me put them into their usual deployment positions and you can take a guess."

A moment later… "Heavy weapons specialist?"

"Yeah, I can do long range sniping, bombardment, and limited shotgun duty… though I should give you fair warning about that, I'm a little… hindered, shall we say, in close combat."

"What do you mean?" Amber bent her left knee and her prosthetic leg actuated for appropriate digitigrade walking "Oh… Well, with that and judging from that landing… Are you… Ungifted?"

Amber nodded grimly "Unfortunately, yes."

"I'm Ungifted too."

_I figured as such from your clinging to me for the landing._ Amber decided to shake off the thought and said "I think we're probably the most screwed pair in this forest then, other than that Jaune boy asking questions earlier about the deployment."

Nutmeg sighed "Then he's probably impaled on a tree somewhere by now… unfortunate, but I suppose this is why they warned us so much in the application for this school. Let's move out."

"So what do you specialize in then?"

"Nothing, I'm a general combatant… but I do a lot of tactical work, it was mostly my wins in my regional tactical competitions that let me come here."

"There's no clip in your… never mind." Amber had just noticed the assault rifle's clip laid horizontally across the top of the weapon, like the clip of Nutmeg's second blocky weapon, a relatively small-calibre weapon small enough to be an SMG. "So, conventional bullets?"

"Conventional bullets. After all… there is no infinitely powerful energy field that cannot be worn down with sufficient firepower."

"Agreed, someone who's just not mentally ready for an attack wouldn't be able to bring up their Gift fast enough to withstand it, ideally… but even discounting that, the Grim lack active use of the Gift, though their skin is very Gift-resistant, so conventional bullets can penetrate and kill them sometimes better than Gift-based munitions can, though we risk running out of ammunition compared to the Gifted."

"Then we had better hurry, no? Ideally find a few Gifted to shadow to avoid too many battles with the local creatures." Amber frowned a bit at Nutmeg's words, thinking it was possible the instructors were herding the beasts toward the students on purpose to test them "Whatever drones are watching, it is called using appropriate means to reduce risk in a mission."

Amber facepalmed _Nutmeg, that's practically an invitation for the teachers to herd a bunch of creatures in our wake to constantly attack us even as we trail the wake of a pair of Gifted… It's not a bad idea, but I… never mind, I could just be paranoid, still, better to remind you of the fact._ "Do you want them to bring the creatures to us to make sure we're properly challenged?" She whispered close to Nutmeg's ear.

"They wouldn't intervene, after all, this is a real test of not only strength, but also of strategy."

Amber shrugged, hoping her new partner's optimism wasn't unfounded "Let's get moving then, keep an ear out for others and beasts." She loaded the In Amber Clad before rotating it back over her shoulder to point upward, safeties still all online. She loaded up the Broken Ember with a fresh clip of explosive shotgun ammunition and nodded to Nutmeg before they walked off through the underbrush of the Emerald Forest, Amber wiping away at her helmet optics suite as they went.

* * *

PREVIEW:

"What was that sound?" There was the soft noise of scales on grass that both of them picked up almost as one.

"I think it's… yes…" A large snake reared up in front of the duo and Amber saw on her HUD's PIP windows aka rear-view windows that another was behind them "a pair of Monty Pythons."

* * *

A/N: You do NOT put giant snakes into a show by someone named Monty Oum without someone making that crack.

* * *

Character Profile: Amber

Height: Formerly 181 cm (5'11"), currently varies depending on prosthetic posture.  
Hair/Eyes: Yellowish-orange, Dark Yellow  
Colour Theme: Amber (obviously)  
Theme Song: Ungifted Hero (modified version of "Working Class Hero")  
Weapons: Crutches (SMG and Sniper), RPG/Shotgun hybrid (Broken Ember), Recoilless Rifle (In Amber Clad, and yes there will be jokes about the name)  
Abilities: Nothing except what conventional weaponry and intelligent use thereof can provide. She lacks the Gift of Dust.  
Role: Insta-gib PVE artillery, PVP artillery/cannon fodder (depending on detection or not), demolitions duty overall.  
Appearance: Legs end a few centimetres below the knee, nose is slightly off-center, many scars on face. Wears summer camo painted armour forged from weapons-grade material (will not stop an enhanced alpha strike from a Gifted but adequate against the Grim and non-enhanced alpha strikes, even from a Gifted).  
Personality: Acts and sounds pessimistic, bitter and sarcastic but in reality is grossly hopeful and laughably optimistic to the point of believing that an Ungifted CAN survive and thrive at Beacon with enough effort.  
History: Attended Sanctum, one year above Pyrrha Nikos, entered the finals of the 596 Mistral Regional Tournament but did not need a tiebreaker duel thanks to the judges marking her down beyond the tiebreaker range of points for blowing up most the floor of the stadium. (This was also the only year Pyrrha won by default instead of curb-stomping her opposition thoroughly.) Managed to claw her way out of being too crippled to attend Beacon through sheer will (and some other, darker things…)

* * *

A/N: I preliminarily identify (in World of Tanks Tier 10 tanks terms) the characters as the following: Ruby = T57 Heavy (in episode 1 the grenade came during her clip reload), Weiss = T62A (nimble rate of fire/damage per minute machine), Blake = T110E5, Yang = E-100, Amber = FV215 (183) running all HESH in PVE (insta-gib ftw!) or a T92 in PVP (if you sit still too long and ignore her you and whatever's near you WILL get raped).

Review?


	4. Where Power Lies

A/N: Nutmeg's SMG-like weapon is a P90 rip-off. HEAT will be referred to as HEAA for now due to the (thus far) absence of tanks in the series. For the record, you can't unlock someone's Gift unless they innately have it but failed to naturally tune in to it on their own. "Ungifted Hero" is Amber's theme for a reason: You can unclog the pipe of someone's Gift if they have it, but if there is no Gift there in the first place… **Why do you think the thugs and the store owner in Episode 1 were so weak?** I am aware Krom is the direct translation of Chrom from Fire Emblem: Awakening but it was the closest thing I could get to Chrome without the team being "Team CAN'T" outright.

The chapter title has many meanings to it. Can you identify them all? (Use a review to try for it)

* * *

Chapter 3: Where Power Lies

_Emerald Forest, Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late August, 597 AD (After Dust)_

"You'd think that with the students coming here every year to kill a lot of them the local creatures would have evolved a healthy fear of humans." Amber said, trying to sound conversational despite adrenaline jitters, as they walked around the body of a solitary Grim Bear that had decided to try for an attack. It had received twelve bullets to the face a la Nutmeg, three of which penetrated through the gaps in its carapace or through its eyes into its brain, and a shotgun blast that ripped its unarmoured chest open with explosive pellets.

"The creatures have, we haven't seen any squirrels or the like, remember? The Grim are just naturally aggressive, and we're intruding on their territories. Besides, the population might just be too large for the intermittent short-term selection we're enforcing to work enough to balance out long-term sustained selection for aggressive territoriality."

Amber stared briefly at the other girl "…Yeah, I can see why you're the tactician sort. You're a lot more intellectual than I am, that's for sure. They usually move in packs, strange to find this one on its own."

Nutmeg checked her compass again, while Amber wished she'd thought to build one into her helmet HUD, using small mirrors and display screens embedded in the helmet to provide relatively comfortable rear-view capability through cameras in the back of her helmet had been the limits of her imagination when she created the thing. Granted, she had a compass stuck away in a pocket somewhere, but that wasn't the point "Then we had better move, perhaps the rest of its pack was killed by other students, north is that way." She pointed into the trees and the two girls continued on their way in a brisk walk, not running because it might make too much noise for their Ungifted ears to pick up approaching threats. "From the maps I checked beforehand, the Emerald Forest is only twenty kilometres north to south, which means four hours there and three back assuming we don't take too much time fighting… I think we should run instead of risking being here when night falls."

"What about our sound emissions?"

Nutmeg shook her head "Anything wanting to catch up would need to move faster, which means noise in this forest that doesn't match our strides. Moving too slow means they too can afford to be stealthy, and our scent is something they can pick up while they can stay downwind."

Amber nodded and broke into a run gripping Broken Ember with both hands "Good reasoning, I only brought what should be enough shotgun ammunition to handle a few good hours of moderate-intensity combat, and I only have three assembled rounds for each of my heavy weapons and seven unassembled rounds for each, plus five grenades. I'll need to have access to the school's Forge if I want to not depend on shipments from home. Still, I'd think we were making at least seven kilometres an hour at that walking pace, so accounting for detours it would have been a bit over three hours to get to the temple." A thought struck Amber "The northern end of the forest… how wide is the forest and how wide is the temple we're targeting?"

Nutmeg's mouth curled downward in an ugly grimace "It'll be nasty search if it's in a random spot on the northern edge of the forest, or god forbid just inside the northern perimeter of the forest."

"Yeah, I hope it's just due north of our launch zone and more or less landing zones… but that might be too easy by the opinions of the instructors."

"We shall see, I suppose, as long as we keep heading north to the end of the forest, we should be able to figure it out on the way or once we get there." Nutmeg pulled out a set of large earmuff-like headphones and put them on. Seeing Amber's look, she explained "Sound amplifier, but puts a ceiling on the volume it amplifies to, so the slightest crack of a twig in the distance will seem like it's happening much closer, but yelling in the mikes will be quieter than normal."

"Nifty, I gotta build one of those into my helmet sometime." _And a compass too, can't forget that._

"I'll help you once we get this mess over with."

"I look forward—" Amber was cut off when Nutmeg held up her SMG-occupied hand abruptly in a STOP gesture.

"What was that sound?" Nutmeg hissed. Amber listened carefully, and both detected the sound of scales on grass, though Nutmeg had positive identification whereas Amber only caught the barest whisper of the sound.

"I think it's… yes…" A large snake reared in front of the duo and Amber saw on her HUD's PIP windows aka rear-view displays that another was behind them "a pair of Monty Pythons. Which one first?"

"The black one." In other words, the one in front of them. "The white won't attack until we're properly distracted, if we kill the black one fast it'll hesitate due to loss of surprise, then go berserk on us, which means more mistakes." General Monty Python hunting in mate pairs involved one partner, usually the larger, distracting the prey while the other waited until a good moment to strike the prey from the rear arc.

Amber pulled In Amber Clad over her shoulder in one smooth motion just before the Black snake's mouth began to open as it began what seemed to be a lunge—probably a fake-out but still… There was no time to yank the recoilless mechanism out, so accuracy would suffer slightly due to the effective barrel length being shorter, but if the snake got much closer it would be within the minimum fuse range of about eight metres and her heavy weapons would be ineffective. The minimum range was usually shorter (five metres) since she had body armour, but this sort of firing gave higher muzzle velocity due to more of the propellant energy being used to accelerate the round. Nutmeg lacked armour, so fragment damage might have normally been a problem for her, but in this case it was hopefully no concern, as the snakes were much larger concerns, literally. Yes, Amber would be knocked on her ass from the recoil, but hey…

There are several things to be said about setting off an 80mm high explosive anti-armour warhead against the roof of a mouth of a giant serpent. One, it bypassed the tough hide completely. Two, the steam from boiling flesh only slightly disrupted the fist-to-finger high-pressure particle stream penetration of the HEAA warhead's copper liner significantly. Three, and most importantly, even the slightly degraded particle stream was enough to puncture the braincase of the beast and set off a steam explosion inside its brain cavity. The huge body crashed to the ground a few metres short of Amber's feet, spasming violently from confused, disrupted, _shattered_ nervous signals.

There was an explosive, enraged hissing from behind them and Amber and Nutmeg rolled/dove to either side as the white snake charged them. Both were firing their guns at the snake's head hoping for a critical hit to an eye, but luck wasn't with them in that respect. It chose the seemingly more threatening target to eliminate first and twisted around to have another go at Amber who fired another couple shotgun blasts into its face as it tried to ram her against a tree to stun her however briefly. She twisted sideways enough to not be hit right on by the creature and went flying past the targeted tree instead.

An explosive popping sound and another detonation later the snake flinched in pain as a smaller-calibre HEAA round detonated against its side and bored deep into the flank muscles in the region. It turned its head back, whipping its tail at Amber to send her flying into another tree with a loud thud and the sound of shattering bark. Nutmeg stood her ground and fired both of her automatic weapons into the snake's head, gradually compromising its scale armour until she began to draw blood as it advanced on her and she evaded repeatedly. This bought Amber time to switch the Broken Ember to rocket mode and to ram an assembled rocket taken from her back down the muzzle of the launcher. Aiming at the back of the snake's head, Amber fired… and missed slightly as the snake shifted, detonating not on the back of its skull but at a near-bounce angle on the left side of the snake's head, searing one eye blind and drawing a large burnt gash down that side of the beast's face.

Nutmeg took the snake's pained jerk toward the direction of the wound as an opportunity to puncture the other eye with her assault rifle now that it was fully open to attack. It took two bursts of three rounds each before one armour-piercing round managed to hit at a good angle and penetrate the back of the eye socket into the brain of the snake. It began to thrash uncontrollably due to the brain damage and swatted her aside harshly as its head whacked her. She rolled several times until she hit a tree trunk back-first at near ground level, sliding down it somewhat before ceasing to move.

"Ow, that freaking hurt, the prosthetics weren't supposed to exert force on my stumps like that." Amber muttered to herself as she picked herself up once the snake went still. To be safe, though, she took her other crutch off her back and fired a sniper round in through the punctured eyeball and out the burnt eyeball through the creature's brain. "Nutmeg, you okay?... Nutmeg!"

"Ouch, maybe I really need to add some more armour than this basic shock vest." The other girl's voice dropped to a whisper as she saw the remarkably thin tree branch that had punctured a hole in the middle of her left palm and snapped off when she hit the tree. "I'm so glad that wasn't my neck." She hissed to herself before shucking her backpack with a wince and rummaging inside for first aid supplies. _And that my headset isn't broken._ She broke off the thinner end of the stick and yanked the rest out the back of her hand once she got Amber to hold the antiseptic gauze ready, wrapping it around her palm a few times and tying it. "I suppose I won't be able to dual-wield anymore, even firing the rifle is going to hurt, a lot. We need to move, other Grim will be drawn to the smell of a fresh kill."

Amber nodded and began following Nutmeg at the pace she set, hopefully enough to be both not too bad for her injury and escape the creatures of the forest "That's going to leave a scar… How come you don't have any facial scars like I do?"

Nutmeg grunted as they continued to jog through the forest "Are you sure you want to talk about this?"

"I take each of these as a lesson with which to make myself better." Amber clenched her jaw, making the two parallel scars running down the right side of her face seem particularly evident. One stretched from temple to chin and the other went from her cheekbone to near the corner of her mouth. "I'm curious as to how you managed to avoid such lessons in pain."

Nutmeg opened and shut her mouth a bit, glancing somewhat uneasily between the forest ahead of and beneath them, the mark that went from Amber's left temple to just below the bridge of her nose—crossing into the horizontal mark where her nose went crooked both front-back and left-right—and the patch that seemed to have been filled in with scar tissue on the outside of the girl's left cheek. "I always took caution, but I have a few scars too, look." She stopped jogging, then stuck her tongue out and Amber saw that the tip was blunter and more scar-like than that of a normal tongue, indicating a nasty bite-off of a chunk had occurred. She was missing a few of her natural teeth too, judging by the shinier synthetic replacements, and a couple other teeth were chipped, much like Amber's poor dental state. "And there's this." She lifted part of her hair to reveal a shiny streak of scar tissue where no hair grew.

Amber grimaced "It seems we are both damaged goods then."

"Unfortunately, yes. Still, we will likely take shorter getting through low-intensity resistance than the others, since monsters are less resistant to our weapons."

"Power lies in the barrel of a gun, hmm?"

* * *

_Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late August, 597 AD, half an hour after previous scene_

"Headmaster, I find the initial results of your challenge… disappointing." The head of the Schnee Dust Company said through the video phone. "An abnormally large number of the Ungifted we have chosen to cull have survived the initial landing. You may have four years on paper to hook up, incapacitate or failing that dispose of them, but remember that it is safer to get rid of them before they know anything of how the world works if you think them inadequate. Two of them for example are clearly inferior, disfigured specimens, but they still live, why? Think on it." The video feed cut off abruptly.

Ozpin knew full well that his hands were tied by the governmental machine, despite his efforts to maintain survivorship rates, he almost always ended up having to send the few Ungifted that caught the Order of Nations' eye off on missions he knew they wouldn't return, at least not in one piece, from. For an Ungifted to attract the eyes of the government, they had to be unusually successful in schooling, be charismatic and stubborn, be exceedingly intelligent, and generally be a potential threat to the status quo. They would eventually either be married into one of the ruling corporate families as a breeder or terminated, such was the way of things. To distract the masses of sheep, all sorts of causes were created and disrupted to stir up conflict among the mindless hordes. For example, the Fauna Rights Movement had been invented to polarize the masses while throwing some of the most downtrodden of society a bone so that they would be loyal to the controllers of the Movement. The White Fang was also a fabrication, used to further divide the opinions of those against the causes it targeted, such as those who thought Fauna were sub-human but didn't need violence to crush versus those who wanted to exterminate them.

Power laid in the hands of those who controlled the economy, so it had always been, so it always would be. One would have to find everything irrelevant, even time, to regulate things enough to give all sides fair chances, and no one, nothing, was eternal. Ozpin had bowed to that reality long ago, and here he was today, another cog in the governmental machine, but at least as such a cog he could save a few of the best Ungifted who were attractive enough to catch the eyes of the children of the ruling families. He should have recommended that Amber Stone girl been dismissed as a potential threat to the status quo when she was crippled and simply barred her entry. Unfortunately for the ignorant, disfigured girl, her determination and skill had been too undeniable in her recovery, and so he'd been ordered to bring her in for termination over her time here. Since the girl would have probably kept fighting the hand of destiny until the government had enough of her and raised a foot to squish her mercilessly, it should be better this way. It was better to die relatively happily after accomplishing an objective or several objectives one had in life than to potentially be labelled a fugitive and hunted down for reasons one didn't know of or understand.

Still, perhaps he could change things up a bit… it was a thought he'd always had, something he'd always tried as clandestinely as possible, though occasionally the government would get slightly irritated at such a thing. This time though he knew he might be putting his career on the line, but if, say, the Schnee heiress ended up on the same team as the two Ungifted that had partnered up, most likely the two he was just told were clearly inadequate thanks to their scars… No, she was too far from the two, perhaps he should just send some beasts their way and see which of the other nearby pairs were drawn to the sound of battle to be on these two's team. They might not tell people there were replacements for losses, but if a team of four lost two combat-capables, it would be sidelined until they recovered, or if they were write-offs, the team would be recombined with other teams.

Yes, that would be what had to be done. Ozpin had lived for a good number of years, seen so many die, the older adults all devolved into terrified animals as the end neared, while the younger ones… they were the only ones that ever were content at the end. In the meantime, he drank some more of his hot chocolate and watched via cameras in the forest from a distance as Pyrrha Nikos spewed the government rhetoric to the Jaune Arc boy. She was talking about the powers only known to those with the Gift of Dust as a manifestation of the soul. Ozpin knew that though it was a lie, there would be no correcting her if he did not wish for a more brutal yes-man of the government to be placed in charge of Beacon.

* * *

_Another half-hour later…_

"There… shouldn't be this many of them in a pack." Amber sprang back and rolled as she slammed another clip into her SMG-crutch/lance hybrid and was spun over by another Grim Bear trying a lunge at the same time as her jump and only catching her shoulder with a glancing hit. It got a shotgun rammed into its front teeth before explosive pellets ripped its oral and nasal cavities apart, beginning a slow, gurgling drowning in its own blood before another blast sent its cranium spalling into its brain, dropping it to the ground as a corpse. Amber yanked the Broken Ember back just before another Grim Bear's swiped attempt to disarm her could take the weapon away, and she shot much of its paw off for its trouble. Then she stabbed it with the bayonet through the eye to end it.

"Tell me about it." Nutmeg gritted out, sweat running down her face as she gripped her assault rifle with both hands, parrying a jab from a Grim Bear before stabbing into its chest with the bayonet and firing a burst just to be safe. She rifle-butted another of the attackers which made it flinch and bought her enough momentum to spin out of its potentially deadly bear-hug attempt. Blood had already stained most of the bandage wrapped around her wounded hand and droplets were collecting at the edge of the binding.

"You know, I get the feeling this might be the end for—" Amber was cut off as she screamed, her right upper arm plate, already damaged from multiple impacts and various Grim strikes, had just been punctured by the canines of a Grim Bear. It received the barrel of the Broken Ember jammed to its eye and a spray of high explosive pellets tearing into its skull before detonating.

"Amber!" Nutmeg grabbed the crutch Amber had dropped with her bad hand and swung it around to stab into the crotch of an unfortunate Grim Bear before putting a spray of rifle rounds into two others. She yanked the bayonet out and the stabbed Bear collapsed and curled up in a ball, roaring in pain before it was put out of its misery with a rifle burst through the eye. Dropping the crutch and ejecting the empty clip of her rifle she slapped in a new clip and yanked back the charging handle a mere moment before she felt a blow land against the back of her head. She couldn't do a thing as her head moved forward with the impact far harder than her neck could possibly withstand… until a loud boom and wet splattering showered the side of her face with bits of shredded flesh. She stumbled forward as her body decided it wanted to keep up with her head and hissed at the bone fragments cutting slightly into her face while pulling out her SMG and going back to dual-wielding, however painful it might be as the guns kicked against her palms again and again.

Amber had used her left hand to stab her sniper crutch into another Grim Bear's chest, spun (pulling the bayonet out) and yanked In Amber Clad over her shoulder enough to fire at the Grim Bear that was trying to take Nutmeg's head off with a swipe. It had punched a hole into the arm, arresting its motion, before exploding and removing said arm. The back-blast had been effectively a huge hammer to the face of the Bear she'd just stabbed, which meant the head and upper frontal torso of said Bear was now a torn-up mess half-liquefied from the concussive shock and with most of the fur seared off by the expanding hot gas from the deflagration of the propellant. The carapace around the head was completely broken up into chunks and many were driven into the flesh.

Amber had already mentally written off that Bear as she blasted it, she yanked out her sniper crutch and spun to fire on the next target in the attacking pack with a psychotic roar to relieve some of the pain in her arm. Fortunately, Grim Bear bites were not poisonous, but they didn't exactly have dental products, hence she needed to get some ethanol on the wound as soon as possible to reduce infection risk or at least extend the time before symptoms showed. _Falling ill in the Emerald Forest would be a definite death sentence, and I didn't come this far in life to die now!_

At the same time, Nutmeg was screaming a higher-pitched yell, wordless and primal, to help distract herself from the blood now beginning to fall like teardrops from her aching hand. When she came back to rationality though, she bellowed "Grenades, Amber! This is it!"

"Cover me!" Amber shouted as she stopped the motion of ducking to pick up her SMG-crutch, having dropped Broken Ember a moment ago for running out of shells and not having time to ram in another clip.

"Okay!" Nutmeg yelled back, splaying her stance and firing off toward both sides as Amber continued to methodically drop one target per one or two shots. The orange-blonde-haired girl yanked a grenade off her bandolier and grabbed the pin cover with her teeth, tearing it open and spitting the cover aside before yanking the pin out with her molars, ignoring the soreness in her gums the motion tended to cause, and lobbing it toward where most of the pack of beasts seemed to be coming from. She had just finished lobbing her second grenade when an ominous clicking met her ears with a sudden cessation of fire from Nutmeg.

The Bears seemed taken aback by the sudden silence too, seeming suddenly more cautious as if not knowing what to expect. Nutmeg's SMG fell from her trembling, pained hand to the blood and leaf-covered ground with a soft noise of fallen leaves from the previous autumn rubbing against each other and the girl hissed lowly as she slapped another clip from her thigh/calf pouches into her assault rifle with a click and yanked back on the bolt to chamber the first round. Amber scooped up her SMG-crutch with a pained arm and levelled it shakily at the opponents. "There aren't many left, we should be able to take them."

Indeed, there were only eleven left, and Amber's sniper rifle crutch clip design allowed her to stuff twenty rounds in there, about seven or eight remained, and they were generally one-shot-one-kill unless she really failed in aiming. That failure to penetrate was far more likely for the lower-penetration SMG crutch in her shaking right hand, which she had nearly a full clip of 30 rounds in right now. Nutmeg also had enough rounds loaded in that assault rifle of hers to take enough targets out. Amber estimated the thigh/calf-length clip on the upper side of the weapon meant at least 80 rounds could be fitted… and she made a mental note to change her weapons with relatively short cartridges to that sort of arrangement to improve ammo supply. "Let's do this." Nutmeg said in a low, quiet voice. There was a soft rustle in a distant bush that the Grim Bears seemed to ignore as their growls of anger grew louder. "Before more monsters arrive." The two females opened fire again, and the beasts leapt to the attack once more.

* * *

_One minute ago… Some distance away._

Krom and his new partner (also old friend) Talon had been making their way north at a good pace, but both stiffened at the sound of gunfire, and not the soft chatter of Aura-based energy weapons both of them knew well. No, it was the harsh cracking of mundane propellant-based projectile weapons that could be heard from much further away. "Hmm, must be a couple students who haven't unlocked their Aura yet." He commented "Let's see if they need any help." He motioned with his chin toward the direction the gunfire was coming from, along with, now, two frenzied roars that may or may not have been from humans.

"A couple more eyes watching out for danger and weapons to fight with are always nice, just gotta make sure they don't backstab us at the temple or on the way back to the top of the cliff."

"I'll keep an eye out for betrayal, Talon, but don't act too paranoid around these guys, whoever they are." Krom smiled and patted his friend on the back as he began running through the forest, Talon following three steps behind him. They soon came upon the sight of two extremely dishevelled girls fighting a pack of Grim Bears, over half the pack had already been slain messily, but the girls looked to be nearing exhaustion too "Not too bad for someone who can't tap into their Aura yet." He whispered to his friend as they slowed to a halt just behind a bush, pushing slightly on some of the branches to keep an eye on things and to make sure these potential allies didn't die on them. If they turned out to be hostile, well… he'd dealt with better-equipped enemies who were in better condition when he himself was worse off.

"Quiet, shield ourselves and watch them." Talon said, a bit redundant as Krom always kept his passive shields up, enough to at least slow down a projectile weapon to non-lethal speeds or energy payloads as his soul dictated, but it was always good to be a bit cautious. They watched as the two girls fought off the monsters, working well together in dealing with the threat, though they did it with brute firepower and not much finesse.

Finally, it was down to the last one that had scampered up a tree while the others swarmed the two and was about to get the drop on one of the girls, the brunette. The orange-blonde girl glanced up first and blasted the creature as it was about to drop on the blonde with what looked like a crutch but probably had a sniper rifle built in judging by the scope on the long, straight side of the crutch. Normal crutches had the bottom looking like a Y, whereas this one looked like a y at the bottom where the two main structural prongs split, with the straight one running straight the entire length of the thing mounting what looked like a clip just below the top crossbar where one's armpit would be rested. She saw the beast falter as the bullet pierced its chin from beneath into its brain, teeter, then continue falling to the side that would lead it toward her friend. The orange-blonde started sprinting at the brunette who was just looking up now at the blonde's shot.

Krom knew she wouldn't make it in time, so he sent one of his throwing blades with an Aura boost that would allow it to sink into the large tree branch and hold the beast by its leg there for at least a moment. The brunette dove aside, and probably would've been in time even if the Grim Bear's fall hadn't been arrested. Seeing her friend move the orange-blonde shifted course drastically so that she'd intercept and accelerate her friend with her already high speed to ensure she made it out from under the falling mass before it could crush her. Both girls tumbled to the ground in a heap but got up quickly enough, looking up and levelling their weapons at the direction the hilt of the throwing blade was pointed, which was a bit off of Krom and Talon's direction but close. "Are you also students?"

Krom knew full well that a lie about why they were watching wouldn't fly so he opted for the truth "Yes, we saw you fighting and decided to wait until the crowd was thinned to help, to prevent any misunderstandings. You girls worked fast though, so by the time we could have jumped in you would have had no trouble at the pace you were going. I nailed that bear's leg to the tree to prevent it from potentially literally getting the drop on you once it seemed you might need a bit of help."

Amber was annoyed that the boys hadn't thought to help them due to their wounds, simply shouting words to announce their presence would have been enough to prevent friendly fire. "…Right, you guys didn't notice we were hurt already? Can you guys guard the perimeter while we dress or redress our wounds?"

"Wouldn't it be easier just to activate your Auras? Talon can activate other people's Auras, though it takes a lot of effort." Talon gave him an un-amused look, then smirked a bit to say that all was forgiven.

Amber shook her head "We can't afford any of us expending too much of our energy reserves before we're out of the Forest, sorry, maybe later."

Amber had begun stripping off the armour of her left arm already, removing the armoured glove first. Then she went about undocking it from the upper torso plate, unlatching from the small connection under the shoulder pauldron, followed by unlocking the halves along the entire arm and sliding the armour off with minimal difficulty. She tore the sleeve off her T-shirt she was wearing underneath and indulged in alcohol application to the two small but ragged holes put on her upper arm by the Grim Bear's teeth. Hissing in pain she looked over to Nutmeg who had applied antiseptic and was re-wrapping her hand in clean gauze once she'd seen the wound had slowed down again in bleeding now that she'd rested the hand. After letting the alcohol dry around the inflamed puncture marks she applied some basic antiseptic cream and wrapped some gauze around it to keep out further dirt.

She'd have to mend her armour once they got back to Beacon, but for now she'd have to make do by hammering the armour piece so the cave-in points didn't distort inward anymore. Fortunately, it was face-hardened material, which meant that once the surface was finally breached, the rest of the material was relatively softer and that meant she could temporarily patch it via pounding back into shape easier. Nutmeg showed her tactical acumen by speaking next before Amber did. "Well, Krom, Talon, thanks for your help, I suggest we cooperate in our journey to the temple. If you feel that we should part ways once we reach the temple, then we will leave, but if you feel we make a good team together by the end of this exercise, we'd be happy to be your team-mates for these four years, if you'll have us."

Talon nodded and replied in a friendly tone "That sounds reasonable, sorry we didn't jump into the fight earlier as soon as we spotted you."

Amber waved him off "It's understandable, let's keep heading north, we can't afford to be here when night falls. There are quite enough beasts around already and still, even though this pack of Grim Bears was abnormally large and we shouldn't run into any more for the next… I'd say at least half an hour."

* * *

A/N: To quote Ackbar: "It's a Trap!"

To those who are annoyed by me not following the Aura aka magic thing of canon quite tightly enough, I just unveiled the main conflict of this fanfic. No, the conflict won't come in again in the immediate future (which is at least the 1st semester at Beacon), but it will eventually come into play and dominate the storyline, for obvious reasons. (Hmm, sounds like how the Pureblood-Supremacy thing isn't the primary thing of my Harmony Shepard series but the last book parody will be named "… and the Red Revolution"…)

**I'm seriously considering giving either Amber or Nutmeg, or both, at least one new scar per major event or mission at Beacon. Please tell me your opinion on this idea.**

REVIEW!


	5. Identity: Fire Support

A/N: Thank goodness I introduced Krom and Talon early, this way the Ungifted will not interfere with the existing teams. Come on, a giant armoured scorpion? That's practically like asking for someone with an anti-armour (tanks don't exist yet in this world, though walkers and striders do) weapon to show up. I'm putting in the whole chess set in the small shrine instead of 10 of each colour, since even this way the Beacon class seems a bit small unless you treat it as an absurdly elite school which really doesn't need that much space in the main compound (much as how Hogwarts has only 280-ish kids but a huge castle to work with). There are some songs later in this fic you might recognize, labelled as "ancient songs", all of them are significant to the story whenever I mention the specific song name.

**I call BS on the idea that a team has to choose matching pieces, and I refuse to follow this method.**

* * *

Chapter 4: Identity: Fire Support

_Emerald Forest, Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late August, 597 AD_

Nutmeg was picking out the bits of bone fragments that had stuck to and in some cases in her face when she thought of something that she hadn't noticed due to the heat of battle. "Amber, if the back-blast of In Amber Clad is so powerful, why didn't recoil tear your shoulder off when you snap-shot that Monty Python in the mouth?"

"I left some provisions for snap-firing in the back plate of the propellant barrel, there's still enough area in the holes to vent most of the pressure, hence it just knocked me on my ass."

"We never caught your names." Krom said from in front of the two girls, not looking back as he pushed his way through the brush. Talon tailed them to make sure threats could be picked up, and, as both girls knew full well, to make sure they didn't try anything stupid.

"I'm Nutmeg Grit," The brunette hissed a bit at the sting of yanking a relatively deeply embedded bone shard out of her face "this is Amber."

"Hello, Amber… can you take your helmet off for a moment if you don't mind so that we can commit your face to memory?"

She snorted, since she'd drawn her polarized helmet visor down after the discussion with Nutmeg about scars thanks to the sun rising higher and the forest getting brighter "I'd rather not give you nightmares, but if you insist…" She said jokingly as she started working at the latches for the polarized visor that covered the top half of her face now, her arm aching now that the adrenaline had worn off completely. She pulled the visor up to let them see her full face and the five major scars it held "Now you see me…" She grinned at them, the parallel long scars on the right side of her face and the gouge scar on her left cheek bulging slightly along with her nose scar, before pulling the visor back down back on "Now you don't."

Both boys looked taken aback and Nutmeg grimaced, feeling sorry for her new friend's facial state, but then Krom said "Amber, there's nothing wrong with having a few scars, but… your face seems awfully familiar…"

"Television, I suppose?" Amber said bitterly, remembering her glory days.

"When were you on TV?" Talon asked, sensing a rant oncoming and wanting to poke as much information out about this girl as possible to make sure she was trustworthy and not sucking up just for his and Krom's families. Although, if she was, then she had another think coming with that face. Granted, she might not have been too hideous before all those scars, but, well…

"Last year's Mistral Regional Tournament finals, I blew up the stadium floor. I mean, I didn't use THAT much explosive, maybe they just had some stashed in the basement that lit off or something. Then some other shit happened and here I am now."

"You're THAT Amber, Amber Stone? You must have worked hard to get the hang of those prosthetics you must be wearing…" Krom looked down toward her legs. "By the way, one of your legs' metal is showing."

Amber facepalmed after looking down "Does everyone know about my disability?" She thought she'd managed to keep it off National TV?

Krom gaped at her for a moment for not realizing how well-known she was—for a name to be mentioned by his mother in relation to the family business generally meant it was important enough to take note of—before saying "Not much of a disability from that fighting I saw in the clearing earlier. If that's you disabled then you'd have been owning most of the school in any duel without application of Aura. You don't need to worry about finding yourself a team with your skill level, Amber and Nutmeg, you're welcome to work with us if the professors allow it and you're willing. I just have to wrangle Talon into agreeing." He yanked his friend aside, barely able to contain his grin on his face "We've really managed to pick up a pair of gems, huh?"

Talon wobbled his head side to side for a bit indecisively "Perhaps, but this means dating at Beacon will be a lot tougher for us. You know the expectations." Said common expectations were that people would most often end up dating their team members, at least during their time at Beacon, and that such relationships forged in relying on each other day after night in the struggle for existence were more often than not determinate of marriages.

Krom rolled his eyes "Yeah, well, I think surviving these years with decent grades is more important, Talon." His parents, for example, didn't put much priority on him finding a partner early, running by the logic of men being able to find good partners anytime in the decades of their prime years so long as they were wealthy and powerful enough

"Unlocking those girls' Auras is…" Talon sighed and sagged a bit before shaking his head with a grimace "you should probably owe me for this, Krom, but, well, we've been bros long enough it doesn't matter in this case. I couldn't feel a damned bit of emissions walking behind them just now, it's going to take a LOT to crack them open enough to use their auras, and that's if they even have any."

Krom snorted "Everything that has a soul has Aura, Talon, don't be absurd."

"Really, Krom, I've been hearing rumours that our parents don't want us to hear, rumours that many people actually don't have Aura, or at least have such faint Auras that they might as well not have any. If they don't have any Auras, they're probably going to end up being liabilities in a sparring match against other students."

"Sparring matches are non-lethal situations, Talon, missions are, and if they're excellent for missions, we'd probably just get better marks for carrying our team…" Krom had a sudden thought "Are you're saying we should hook up with another pair of guys so that we don't have the expectations weighing down on us?"

"I don't want that Amber to crack any of the reflective surfaces in the dorm suite we're going to be stuck sharing if we end up a team."

"Oh please, did she look clumsy to you during that mad brawl?" Krom's brain caught up to his mouth and he realized what Talon meant. "Have you seen pictures of her from before her accident? She was never remotely near Pyrrha Nikos' standard of beauty," Krom had previously wondered if Pyrrha was aware of how popular she was in internet art, but she obviously knew, it was kind of hard to miss, even if the artists weren't necessarily that good at portraying her accurately. "but Amber wasn't sub-par back in the day, and she's not exactly mirror-cracking hideous either… yet." _Granted, the gouge marks on her cheeks are kind of gross-looking, but hey, if Talon insists I can jokingly refer him to the fact that Amber's inner clear visor is slightly reflective and has not yet shattered from the strain of her face._ "That Nutmeg girl isn't ugly either."

"You just have a thing for people who are too stubborn to know when to quit, people like you."

"That sort of people will fight for the win or die trying, if they really are Aura-less as you claim they might be they'll be perfect as distractions, bait, punching bags for the enemy for however brief a moment they survive under fire. A moment is all we'd need to strike, Talon."

"Nice way to word it from the angle of practicality, Krom. Very well, we'll hang onto them until we find better people to be on our team. Let's go."

While the boys had gone off to talk, Nutmeg was lamenting how her headset had been hit by a Grim Bear's near-miss swipe and the microphones had been knocked out of action, so they couldn't hear what the two young men were saying about them. Amber was reloading In Amber Clad and had decided to stow it in full deployment configuration—though this would make flight a bit harder to control—for now. She was also cleaning Broken Ember as much as she could before reloading it with a fresh clip.

The next orders of business were to pick up as many of the magazines they'd dropped as possible for reuse, though most had been dented or crushed underfoot by either they themselves or the Grim Bears. There was also the matter of re-hydrating with salted water. Amber was never so glad she'd included not just plain Dust thrusters in her propulsion pack but also a system to siphon energy from said engines for an air conditioning system inside her armour. Even though that didn't prevent her from sweating, it sure helped once the few places she used armour servos sensed a long activity spike and steady increase in body temperature. "You were a lot more nimble than I was, Nutmeg."

"Less weight, but also less protection, and you're probably bulkier under that armour than I am to compensate for the additional weight a bit. The defence increase was huge though, it took a lot of hits before your armour was compromised enough to fail to even a penetrative attack, whereas I probably spent more time dodging than killing stuff."

"Let's face it, we're both immensely impressive for being ungifted, worked our whole lives to get to this point, and are reaping the rewards which are our continued survivorship." Amber deadpanned. Nutmeg didn't look impressed "Still, we wouldn't last a second against someone with full combat use of their Aura under control. That is why I came here. I presume you are the same?"

"No, I just got a special invitation because I caught Beacon's eye during strategy tournaments."

"Right, but why did you choose to accept the invitation?"

Nutmeg snorted "You mean why did I choose to accept knowing the risks? Because this is a good place for me to put my skills to real use instead of being a hobbyist tactician. I don't want to be stuck doing some grunt job for the rest of my life, I wanted something exciting and which could make a real difference, so here I am."

"Sounds about right… how's the hand?"

"Still hurting, not bleeding anymore though. I'm going to be in the infirmary for a while if my face gets infected…" She pulled out a medium-sized bottle and poured a good deal of the clear liquid in it into her hand "hopefully with the amount of alcohol I'm gonna rub in…" She hissed and trembled a bit as she shut her eyes and bent over to stick her face into the antiseptic chemical, starting near her temple and straightening her waist, rubbing downward in one long stroke that applied the alcohol to all the small cuts on that side of her face. "…It won't get infected. Any infection on the head is very dangerous, you know, too close to the brain for it to be secure if any bacteria get into the bloodstream or interstitial fluid between cells. Ugh… I think I got a bit in my eye." She wiped away the tears after her alcohol-stained hand dried. "I hope that'll be better. Can't afford putting any gauze on it in case we get in a fight, can't hinder my vision if they come loose."

Strangely enough, they didn't encounter any more creatures on their way to the north, and after a mere hour of jogging (with no beast encounters, oddly) they reached a relatively small clearing with the ruins of a circular stone structure in it. The outside had most of a circle of columns holding up what had once been a ring of stones, one side of which had collapsed some time ago. There was no roof, and Amber wondered what sort of temple would have no roof, perhaps one to some sort of sun god? She frowned "We're here already? But Ozpin said it would be at the northern end of the forest…"

"We're in the north half of the forest, so I suppose it more or less fits the description, but this is such a small target in a sea of trees, how would they make sure students didn't wander right past it? A few dozen metres into the forest on either side and even the vegetation wouldn't tell you there was a clearing here. It makes no sense unless there are many of these shrines. Be careful guys, this could be a trap." Nutmeg held up a hand as she picked a twig off the ground and threw it forward. Nothing happened except the twig hitting the stone floor in the shrine "Krom, Talon, can guy guys find me a good sized chunk of fallen wood and chuck it into the temple? The motion and weight should trigger most types of traps I can think of unless they require body heat to activate."

"I'll go if the wood doesn't activate anything, my armour would probably withstand a typical trap better than flesh would." Amber said, pulling her visor down again form where she'd popped it up for the jog and sealing her helmet again.

"I'm not so sure Professor Ozpin would bother with traps, the relics, if those things count, seem to be chess pieces." Krom pointed out, he was starting to think the girls might be a bit too paranoid to be fully sane. It wasn't like he and Talon wouldn't have their aura shields running full power and weapons out when they went in, after all.

"A simple test, but profound, if it is so. Still, we must be cautious, Krom, Talon, we can't afford getting hurt if there are traps designed to test our wariness." Nutmeg called to the two young men who nodded and went off, looking around to see if there were existing fallen logs they could hack up and/or haul over.

"32 pieces, hmm?" Well, there were 32 pedestals if Amber counted correctly, but some of the pieces were missing, that could just be bait for a trap though, to lure one into a false sense of security "Well, I was under the impression there were 68 people starting at Beacon this year… did they expect the attrition rate of this mission to be truly that high if this is the only shrine?" Amber said quietly, Nutmeg barely caught her words.

"Don't worry about it, Amber, we're still fine and we got escorts now, we'll make it back… and there's no reason this would be the only shrine anyhow"

"Interesting that someone else was here and didn't already trigger any traps, then again they could be auto-reloading traps… So, what piece do you think we should take?"

"I'm not sure, I was thinking one of the black pieces, as we're both ungifted, always a step behind the Gifted but with the chance to prevail."

"Hmm… good idea… hey, the men are back!" There was a thud as the two chucked the lump of wood onto the shrine's front steps. "Hmm, nothing yet, well, my turn." The armoured girl walked forward cautiously, hunched over and clutching her shotgun at the ready.

In the end, it turned out there were no traps, well, not when Amber first walked in at least. Krom and Talon were both amused at Amber's subsequent trap-triggering attempts which included scaling one of the columns, running around the top broken ring of stones, jumping up and down all over the floor, and so on. It wasn't until Nutmeg had watched enough of her partner making a fool of herself that she mentioned "Amber, maybe the trap of this place is to make us act like idiots?"

The armoured girl, in the middle of throwing sticks at the relics to knock them all off their pedestals, stiffened and looked back "Maybe, but if some trapdoor swallows us after we take a relic, I told you so."

"We'll risk it." Krom said with a smile as the other three walked into the ruins and Nutmeg joined Amber in putting the black pieces back on their pedestals. Krom and Talon put the gold ones back up before standing there silently staring around at the pieces.

* * *

It took Amber a few minutes of thinking to figure out her choice "I vote for one of the Black Pawns, for we are from among the masses of Ungifted and from simple backgrounds, yet, selected for a special purpose and promoted, we can become the most powerful of forces. We may always be a step behind in some ways, but the gap can be shortened if we survive and make it to the end of the long, dangerous grind to promotion. Through the fire and flames, we who endure will grow to be forces to be reckoned with, and, in the end, prevail against our enemy."

Nutmeg merely smirked and grabbed a random pawn to pass to Amber, then nodded gravely and the orange-blonde girl put it in a pocket "A more positive look than my thought, which was that it is the most grossly underestimated and therefore potentially the most dangerous of pieces. Are the boys done yet?" She looked over "Well, let's sit around and take a break while they decide."

"Yeah, you do that, I'm going to restock my assembled ammunition slots." Amber pulled a box off her back and opened it to reveal the separate parts of the recoilless rifle rounds for In Amber Clad and disassembled rockets for Broken Ember. The recoilless rifle came first as its alpha strike delay was shorter, even proportionally speaking relative to the alpha strike power.

* * *

_Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late August, 597 AD_

Ozpin listened. The girls' reasoning was sound and filled with youthful hope and determination, yet Ozpin knew that, tragically, that same determination would be what would consign them to their deaths. The defiance that they would eventually be expected to show toward the Gifted-dominated social hierarchy was too much to allow them to live. Ozpin wished he could do something to avert their demise, but the only thing he could do was either give them a quick end or try to hook them up with some of the sons of the ruling families. _Even that didn't always work_, he thought bitterly as he thought back to the best Ungifted student he had even personally dealt with, back when he was new to the school as a professor.

That led him to switching drones to looking at Ruby Rose, niece of his old friend, and her partner, well, mostly the partner. _Regardless of all else, the White Fire burns on, even if He was too cowardly to give her daughter the blade's true name… Mere Tenacity, for that was all she had, even at the bitter end, it turned out that it was all she really had_. It was interesting that Weiss had a reputation as an ice princess given her mother's nickname for her as an infant was "Spirit of Fire", but it was even stranger how the hell Weiss got _that_ name for her repaired weapon out of her few memories of her mother from before the woman was silenced.

* * *

_Emerald Forest, Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late August, 597 AD_

On the other side, Krom and Talon had spent a couple more minutes thinking before looking at each other and reaching for the same gold rook (_Hmm, odd they wouldn't use the standard white chess pieces instead…_) in front of them. "It seems we agree."

"Yes, indeed."

Both had a good idea what the other was thinking, but neither said it out loud. The fact that they had both been raised almost in proverbial ivory towers, how they hadn't been free to interact with other echelons of society, and the power but also the imprisonment represented by a castle came together to guide them to choose said piece. As for why they had chosen the white rook instead of a black one, it was because white moved first in chess, and the first strike advantage was invaluable, the initiative that granted and its retention critical to victory. Though the rook was a very hindered piece in the initial melee of pawns, in the long run, in the end-game, it could well be decisive as the board thinned out and only the elite of both armies remained in action.

"We have chosen." Krom said to the two girls sitting on the steps of the shrine, holding their guns loosely as they waited.

Nutmeg stood up before Amber, who was quickly packing away after assembling only two recoilless rifle rounds and no new rockets, did "So have we. We chose a black pawn, you?"

"White rook, though these ones are gold."

"Interesting." Nutmeg nodded slowly, thinking _Late-game lane control unit, excellent for killing off enemy pawns as they promote if you station one in the last line with the King out of the way, but trapped… helpless… restricted in the earlier game before the pawn lines begin thinning to let them move out without taking too many turns to do so. If Amber and I are but pawns… does this mean we need to keep half an eye out for them? They wouldn't telegraph any such intent so openly though, would they?_ "Let's get started heading back to the cliff."

* * *

_About three minutes later…_

They were proceeding back at a walk when they ran into Pyrrha Nikos… and then almost got run over by the giant scorpion that had been crashing through the under-growth of the forest after her. Nutmeg let loose a spray of rifle rounds at its face hoping to take out a couple of eyes while Amber pulled the In Amber Clad up for a snap-shot. The creature had been hit and blinded in one of its eight eyes by a bullet hitting at a decent angle, and swiped its pincer across at them, and as a result In Amber Clad's shell detonated against a pincer as both girls jumped back. The creature bellowed in outrage and lashed out with its other, unharmed pincer, but the two men it had swiped toward were no longer where they had been, having moved to the offensive already with their blades.

As the creature swung itself in the attempted strike Amber sucked in a sharp breath. The carapace on the other side of the pincer was horribly warped and the pincer seemed incapacitated, but the fact that it wasn't shattered or holed cleanly through meant the carapace alone had been much better than expected against the energy of shaped charges. The steam blast alone should have ruptured most of the flesh in the pincer completely and probably allowed the shaped charge to blow a concussive wave based hole in the other side of the pincer. That meant she needed something bigger in payload than In Amber Clad, she needed the Broken Ember firing rockets. She considered asking them to distract it for only a moment before deciding running was a better option to buy time, less risky given the size and power of the critter.

"Back to the shrine, make some time!" She shouted out to Nutmeg as she pitched the recoilless rifle into marching position and grabbed her shotgun/rocket launcher hybrid. The other girl nodded and dove to one side before the scorpion's tail stinger smashed a pit into the trunk of the tree she had been standing in front of. It managed to hit Krom with its lashing tail as it yanked it out though, and the grey-haired boy was thrown quite a ways by the impact, though he hung onto his longsword and yanked himself up with its tip in the ground. Talon and Pyrrha grabbed him up and they started pulling ahead of the two ungifted, partly as Amber was experiencing more drag than she would normally have, having to shift the Broken Ember between shotgun and rocket launcher configurations left no hands for helping get through the brush.

This involved rotating the rear half of the chamber mechanism and stock of the shotgun upward, breaking it off from the barrel and fore-half of the chamber (ergo the name) before swinging the top carrying handle assembly up. She locked it into place, flipped the whole implement over and pushing a rocket down the barrel as they burst into the clearing where a number of others, including Talkative Girl, Tall Green Jacket, Blonde Mane, Ruby, Black Themed Girl, Jaune and Weiss, were standing around chatting.

* * *

A/N: I feel Episode 8 seemed TOO choreographed and convenient, ergo I changed it up a little to make it more messy, gritty, and generally somewhat more realistic. Note that the kills are scored by the same people as in canon, but mechanisms and immediate assistance differ somewhat (the stinger with that short of a fall wouldn't penetrate enough carapace to stay lodged in).

* * *

_Twenty minutes later…_

"What… the fuck is wrong… with BEACON'S ARCHITECTURE? …REALLY? A FUCKING alley of… death and then CHASM?" Amber yelled as they ran down the rows of stone structures, bombarded by a flier that Ruby had pissed off and chased by the giant scorpion.

"Ammo under half!" Nutmeg shouted as she released an empty clip with a click.

"We need to make a stand somewhere where there's cover, where that flier can't pick us off!" Jaune yelled as they took cover among the stone structures from another bombardment of ejected feathers.

"No! Lure it in for melee attacks where we can hit weakpoints!" Nutmeg retorted.

"What did you think I meant! Picking us off involves RANGE!" Jaune screamed back.

"Weiss, freeze one of its wings while we take care of the scorpion!" Amber yelled.

"Cover me!" The white-clad girl yelled and the others poked their weapons out of cover and began raining rounds on the tough-skinned flier while the scorpion still had some distance to cover before it could reach them. She revolved the dust munitions cylinder of her rapier to the appropriate setting before taking aim down the blade as if it were the barrel of a gun, firing and scoring a solid hit that cascaded the moisture from the nearby air into a mantle of ice above the feathers of the Grim.

Unfortunately the creature only faltered for a moment before it broke the ice coat outside its feathers by smashing the wing against the stone of their side of the chasm before Beacon Cliff. "Didn't work!"

"We need to make our stand against the scorpion now! Who else has heavy weapons?"

"Nora has a revolving grenade launcher." Ren said. They'd all learnt each other's names on the run.

_Why the fuck would you bother with a magazine on an Aura-based weapon unless it's for different types of Dust to give the round different properties? Right I just answered my own qeustion._ Amber wondered briefly before dismissing the thought. "Nora, Nutmeg, stun the scorpion, everyone else make sure the flier can't fire any more feathers at us! I don't care how but distract it while I kill the big bastard! Anyone melee-only, cover Nora and Nutmeg as they fire!"

"Hope you're… never mind you are loaded. On three… one, two, THREE!" The small army's worth of students broke cover almost at once as the flier came back toward them for a second pass.

"Aim for the underside where the head meets thorax!" Nutmeg yelled at the other girl as she fired her pink-explosion rounds at the reinforced skull of the scorpion. "Ventral nerve cord runs near there, we can paralyze it better hitting that area!"

"Concussion works too! And my explosives work better by concussion against tough armour!" Nora blabbered—there were no other terms to describe the incredible speed of her speech—before she had even fired four rounds in quick sequence. The creature recoiled, but was still advancing somewhat.

Amber had been sighting in on the skull of the scorpion, getting a fix on its pattern of flinches, but she was hit in the back by a projected feather just when she was about to fire, and cried out in pain as it pierced her backpack-type compartment, tore a hole in her back armour, and dug into her flesh, halfway to scratching against her shoulder blade thanks to the armour slowing it. If she hadn't been wearing her armour it would have torn through her body with no trouble whatsoever. "AH!" She cried out, flinching before steadying her aim, ignoring the pain as she shifted her arm, sighting in again on the no longer recoiling scorpion that seemed to have finally realized the concussive shells against its carapace weren't hurting as badly as it had been before. She sighted in on the forehead of the beast as it angled its head down somewhat to cover its thin underbelly, and fired.

There was a loud popping noise as the Broken Ember set off the initial gunpowder launch charge a la recoilless mechanism with the back end open, and then a thunderous explosion as the warhead, having had more than enough space to arm itself, impacted the target and went off. Still, her aim had been off just far enough that instead of completely pulverizing where its brain should have been it merely tore a broad gash through the carapace, stunning the creature thoroughly by steam explosion inside its head but not quite killing it completely. "Nora!" Nutmeg yelled, hoping the girl had more rounds left to fire.

"On it!" The girl had redeployed her grenade launcher into a large hammer and jumped with a blast to assist her—_Damned Gifted can bypass laws of angular momentum…_ Amber thought enviously as she watched—before coming down with a smash into the open wound and firing at point blank. The resulting splatter of scorpion organs left the girl wiping herself off as Jaune, Krom and Talon, all effectively melee-only, were occupied hacking the scorpion's still-moving remains to bits. "Why… won't… you… die… already?" Each of Nora's words was punctuated by another blast into the thing's body cavity and another wet splattering of bits out of said cavity through the hole in its head.

"Nora? I think the others might need our help." Nutmeg's sentence ended with the click of her under-slung grenade launcher's clicking, indicating it had been reloaded successfully. "Amber, how are you for rounds?"

"Only one rocket left ready to go in ten seconds, but I can reload In Amber Clad if you give me fifteen seconds, three rounds for that. Almost out of everything else."

"They need heavier weapons, they aren't piercing the thing's carapace and hide enough." Amber noted.

"We need to pin it in place somehow and then get enough of an alpha strike to penetrate through so that we can hack it to bits at our leisure." Nutmeg said. "Amber, can you get enough of an alpha to stun it from this range?"

The orange-blonde was already shoving another round down the barrel of her recoilless rifle "It should be easy enough with In Amber Clad, the round velocity and payload is higher than the typical Aura-based weapon so with that target's speed unless it's doing an attack run hitting shouldn't be too large of a challenge. The others are hitting it just fine, they just aren't penetrating." _Not surprising given Gift-based—pah, Aura is a foolish term, used as if everyone normal has it—weapons are usually more reliant on the energies of the mind than physical energy like a lot of rapidly expanding hot, compressed air._

The round hit the side of the beast just below a wing a moment later, and the creature flinched sharply and began to head for the cliff side to have a moment to lick its wound. Unfortunately for it, Yang (Amber had learn the names ) seemed to disagree with that idea and leapt onto the back of its head, blasting its eyes to try to blind it, making it crash into the cliff for not pulling up fast enough. It fell onto a ledge a bit below and spun around blindly.

"Holy… are they serious?" Amber said as she kept shoving the rocket into Broken Ember to go for a bombardment shot as Weiss froze its tail to the rock face. With the injured wing, countless small scratches all over from hits by the ranged small-arms of the group, and half-blinded—at least, the protective covers of its eyes were badly scratched up and it wouldn't dare retract them while fighting, it tried to fly but failed due to not being able to produce enough lift. In the meantime, Blake's weapon was using Ren's and Yang's as anchors while Weiss's acceleration field gave the Ruby slingshot an added boost. _Not gonna work, if that thing arches its back as Ruby hits it, it could pull Ruby's footing upward and off before she can attach to the line of gravity portals Weiss has projected onto the cliff face, assuming they're mainly calibrated to resist downward and outward forces. Granted I'm thinking Ungifted laws of physics, but still._ Amber thought as she aimed center mass at the flier. _This should do it, payback for this new wound you gave me, probably gonna leave a small scar too…_

The flier's first instinct on being hit with the thing it didn't quite see digging into its neck somewhat would have been to arch its back and flap both its wings "up" i.e. lift them toward its back, to try to get its head under the object and escape. This could in fact have lifted Ruby off like peeling a gecko from a window thanks to the angle calibrations of the gravity field. However, being punched in the chest by a large explosion a moment later and the steam blast that escaped the deep wound, sending its spine recoiling against the cliff face, made it curl inward. This allowed Ruby to hold even tighter to Weiss's projected glyphs as she charged up the cliff face firing her weapon for extra energy all the time, finally catching the flier by its neck at the top and sawing completely through what was left of its neck with one final weapon discharge.

"Badass incarnate." Amber whispered in awe as she lowered Broken Ember… _Wait, are those… damned Gifted always have to show off, rose petals, really?_

"So, what exactly are the teams we're going with?" Nora was back to being sunny again.

"Ruby and Yang with their partners, they're sisters, obviously they should be on the same team." Nutmeg analyzed, also lowering her weapon a tad. "Me and Amber are probably going to stick to Krom and Talon for their melee to complement our range, if they'll have us. That means You and Ren should probably work with Pyrrha and Jaune, if you don't mind that is."

"Of course not, Ren worked well with Pyrrha and I worked well with Jaune so I'm sure we'll get along just fine…"

"…We can always be allied teams though."

"Ooh, that would be nice too!"

* * *

_Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late August, 597 AD_

"I get the feeling people are expecting whoever the first letter of the team code is to lead, but that's not true, I've only named two teams so far and gone for the tactician types in both, but even that is not a guarantee of leadership. The next team, for example, will be led by raw, indomitable willpower, refusing to bow under the pressures of life's challenges. I give you Amber Stone, Nutmeg Grit, Krom Electra, and Talon Drake, who chose a black pawn and white rook, Team TANK." Their faces went on the screen as they walked across the stage. There was a bit of whispering at those who had been fortunate enough to not need to haul back pawns bringing them back, but it soon quieted.

"He should have gone with KANT, I wouldn't feel like a fish in an aquarium waiting to get shot, it's not so different from a barrel after all." Amber muttered to Nutmeg, who chuckled a bit.

Neither of them knew that Amber had just hit the nail on the head with respect to the whole point of letting the best Ungifted into Beacon.

* * *

Character Profile: Nutmeg Grit

Height: 176 cm (5'9")  
Hair/Eyes: Brown  
Colour Theme: Brown (obviously)  
Theme Song: Let It Be  
Weapons: SMG (P90 rip-off), Assault/Battle Rifle (similarly constructed but larger calibre and much longer barrel) with under-slung grenade launcher, Hand Grenades.  
Abilities: Good at formulating battle plans, otherwise, nothing except what conventional weaponry and intelligent use thereof can provide. She lacks the Gift of Dust.  
Role: Tactician, can serve as general infantry if needed  
Appearance: Some teeth replaced by synthetics, some others chipped, bald scar on head hidden by hair, tip of tongue missing, some other scars under clothes, very physically fit like Amber, wears summer camo shirt and pants when on-duty.  
Personality: Highly analytical, but like Amber she is hopeful and optimistic to the point of believing that an Ungifted CAN survive and thrive at Beacon with enough effort.  
History: Won several regional strategist tournaments, raise in a happy, caring family, oldest of three children, middle child is a brother and youngest is a sister.

* * *

A/N: Krom and Talon showed some of their upbringing, the lessons they have been taught from a young age as heirs to two of the Families (granted, not nearly as powerful as the Schnee Family). Yes, you just saw me build a bit more history for Weiss and Myrtenaster, which is an IMPORTANT plot point and should help make this more of a divergent fanfic than the "just another team at Beacon" trope. I also hope I made the Initiation seem more thoughtful than Yang did (seriously? Dumb Blonde Syndrome must have been afflicting her at that time…).

**QUESTION: Should Weiss's mother have secretly survived the kill order and make a return later in this fic?** If she did survive, her theme song would be "This Time It's Different" (please go watch the music video on YouTube by Augustinjm with this song, it includes World of Tanks, World of Warplanes and World of Warships footage from trailers—including a screen from an April Fools' trailer involving a dinosaur—and gameplay footage). Note that I don't know many English songs so my repertoire of possible themes is highly limited, only a few characters will have theme songs.

**REVIEW PLEASE!**


	6. The First Month

A/N: Alright, so I haven't got much in mind yet on the content of the filler chapters of school life, but some chapter titles will be "Hearts of Iron, Wheels of Steel", "In Amber Clad" (you can guess what that means), "White Fire, Grey Ashes", "Crouching Ruby, Hidden Weiss" and the epilogue will most likely take the title "The Deconstruction of Failing Sparks" as a Babylon 5 reference (NO, this series doesn't lead there, but I just liked the concept for that epilogue after reading the Wikipedia entry on it and if I'm going where I think I'm going I will need the 200, 1000, 2000 and 102,000-year entries, at least, given Kane is here and will still be around then).

Although the Grim were specified to have various names in Episode 9, I shall reserve those as the more official terms and keep my informal terms, thank you very much, **Monty Oum using giant snakes makes changing it from "Monty Pythons" not an option for me**. I wish episode 10 wasn't so focused on the A-Team, cause I need to know what sort of shit actually goes down at Beacon.

* * *

Chapter 5: The First Month

_Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late August, 597 AD_

"School uniforms, huh?" Amber stared at the freshly laundered sets of clothes they'd been issued. This… could be a reputation problem, but she'd deal with it come morning. The current priority was to make the room they'd been issued acceptable. Therein laid the first problem.

"Co-ed housing? Really?" Nutmeg deadpanned. "Given the reputation of mixed-gender teams at this place, I wonder what the pregnancy rate is for such teams." The boys stopped chatting suddenly and stared at Nutmeg. Talon signed, then face-planted intentionally, cushioning himself with his aura, for a dramatic response, looking up to express his opinion of that line, while Krom facepalmed and Amber pretended not to hear her as they all unpacked.

Amber took a look at the stuff the boys had brought, then at her and Nutmeg's luggage, followed by a moment of chatter with Nutmeg "If you guys have friends you'd like to visit please do so while we rearrange the room to suit our levels of luggage."

"Well…" Talon started before he and Krom were pushed out of the door (read: picked up and dropped unceremoniously outside the door to either side of it) by the two females.

Twenty minutes later, the boys came back from wherever they went, and were permitted entry. "I am very glad I practically only brought my laptop with me for note-taking and other tasks." Amber noted, looking at the two young men who had been allocated something approaching seventy percent of the room. They at least had the etiquette to look ashamed as Nutmeg nodded agreement and shoved her two suitcases of luggage that wasn't immediately relevant under her bed to conserve space. It seemed the two men were from relatively spoiling families, though that was no surprise given the Electra and Drake families were quite wealthy and powerful, nowhere near the influence of the Schnee family, but still strong in their own right.

By the end of the evening, the room had the stark contrast of sixty percent of the walls featuring all sorts of art and posters while the other forty percent (less than that much of the room's floor space, but given the end wall counted… yeah) being completely bare. A desk with two laptops, one facing in each direction was stuck between two beds so that they could use the desk while seated at the beds and each bed could only exit one way, toward the closer wall. The bed heads were pushed up against one short edge of the rectangular room and the bookshelves that would have been near them moved over to the men's side to handle their junk. One of the two desks on their side had also been shoved over to the men's side to help make space for all their stuff. "How the hell did you guys even think to bring that much stuff with you?" Amber muttered as she finished wrapping up the mattress in a cover and started laying her foam egg-carton-like pad and various sheets atop it. The boys chuckled abashedly while inching their stuff over toward their side a bit. Amber scowled and yanked the relevant shelves back over "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need, you men need the space more than we do." _Unless you're afraid we'll steal your stuff if you leave it too close to us._ She thought. Krom and Talon grimaced and nodded in submission.

"I hope we can get a bit of privacy as we prepare for bed." Nutmeg muttered, pulling out a thinner shirt. Amber snorted and started pulling her own shirt over her head. The two young men, who had been looking toward their side of the room anyhow, snorted, rolled their eyes and glanced over before doing a double-take at Amber's exposed back. Both young men winced and felt at their backs subconsciously, turning away with shudders of pity.

"I don't need privacy if their first reaction is revulsion, especially given I'm repulsive enough to turn straight men gay if they get convinced most women look anything like this under their clothes." She told Nutmeg, chuckling morbidly as she sat on the desk and removed her prosthetic legs before undoing her belt and removing her pants, showing more scars, many from the rockslide that had crushed her legs, leaving only her bra and panties on as she chucked the clothes atop her bedside table. She crawled off the desk onto her bed and wormed herself under the covers. Nutmeg sighed and did the same, though she covered her own considerably less extensive scars with a nightshirt before pulling herself into bed.

"What are you two waiting for? Don't tell me YOU have a thing for privacy…" Amber, staring up at the ceiling, thought Nutmeg sounded rather embarrassed, but it was a valid question…

"Alright, no need to get upset…" Krom replied while Talon held his hands out in front of him in a "whoa there, stop!" gesture before they started changing as Nutmeg finally laid down and went to the task most people trying to sleep involved themselves in: staring at the ceiling, wall, or neighbouring bed while trying to fall asleep.

* * *

Amber found that even two hours into the night she couldn't sleep, feeling naked and vulnerable without her armour, weapons, or legs. She curled her knees toward her chest and rubbed at her calloused stumps as she was prone to doing when she was nervous and wasn't wearing her prosthetics. "Nutmeg?"

"Yes?" The other girl seemed unable to sleep either, though from the deep, steady breathing from the other side of the room neither of the men seemed to have the problem.

"I feel naked."

"You pretty much are" Nutmeg sounded and looked amused. "How do you even sleep on all those scars? I couldn't spot a place to put a hand on your back without covering part of a scar."

"Don't troll me. Scars aren't much different from normal skin once they heal over, but back when they were fresh I'd have to lie on my side, still perfectly doable without feet given how they left my knees intact."

"Sounds right to me." Nutmeg sighed "I know what you mean about feeling naked, I feel soft and defenceless without my flak jacket. You usually wear much heavier armour, it must be much worse for you. Also, you carry much heavier weapons…"

"At least you can run away. I can't run and without my armour's engines I can't even think of flying unless it's a one-way trip off the top of a building or out a window. I'm glad we got an assignment on the ground floor near the fire exit. I can crawl there fast enough to get out alive, hopefully, if there's a fire or something. I've gotten good at crawling since the amputations. Putting on these damned legs takes time and they wouldn't let me bring my crutches because I weaponized them. I feel so impotent right now that I'd rather sleep in the locker room if it means I can hang on to my equipment."

Nutmeg was silent for a brief moment "We could try to go see Professor Goodwitch and argue for them giving you your crutches. It would solve one problem…" Amber took up two lockers due to the bulk of her armour (mostly thanks to the rigidity of the propulsion assemblies) and weapons put together, a problem easily resolved if she could carry her crutches around or better yet wear her armour, though that wouldn't go so well with the school uniform. "Aren't you even mildly nervous about sleeping in the same room as two guys without any supervision?"

"No, we're going to have to trust each other with our lives, I can trust them to not try anything."

"Good argument there. Here, hold onto this." Nutmeg rummaged in the trunk she towed out from under her bed for a moment, then pulled a small block out, unfolding to a pistol with the push of a button and folding back up to an innocuous block with another push of the button. "It'll make you feel better, I hope."

"Thanks, Nutmeg, how'd you persuade them to let you hang onto this?" Amber looked at the weapon's safety dial carefully before locking a cap over said dial to make sure it was sure to stay safe.

"Everyone has little things they haul around all the time, that can technically be used as weapons. This was mine. It's also a multi-function tool, it can work as a pair of pliers, a knife, whatever."

"Cool, I gotta make one of these for myself… What about yourself?"

"I'll manage, thanks for the reassurance… I feel like I can rest peacefully now."

"You have another one don't you?"

Nutmeg chuckled a bit at her astute but blunt partner "Yeah…"

"Good night then…"

"Night…"

* * *

_Electra Residence, Vale Continent, Same Time_

The matriarch of the Electra family (it was a matrilineal family) dropped her pen with a clatter as she watched the video of the team inauguration ceremonies at Beacon. She thread a hand through her long orange hair, rubbing her scalp, and sighed "I hope Krom doesn't have an Oedipus complex."

Her husband patted her shoulder with a grin "He probably doesn't, but that won't stop him… or any of our sons for that matter—" She shot him a dark look as if blaming him for not having any daughters out of the three tries she'd been willing to give at the endeavour "—from subconsciously associating yellow and orange with warmth, contentment, and safety."

"I know, it's too bad that girl's so… disfigured, having some Aura-less blood come into the family sometime in the next two or three generations would help keep our Auras strong, but that Amber Stone girl would make us the laughingstock of the Families. Weiss is so superior in every way… and Silver didn't have an Aura so that's already a source of Aura-free genes for the family…"

"Well, she's certainly no Silver Grant, but she's still tough enough to get in despite that disability, that says something. We'll see, I hope our son isn't that shallow though." Both of them went quiet for a moment thinking of their dead friend and former teammate. Silver's daughter was starting at Beacon too this year and there was an agreement between the Schnee and Electra families dating all the way back from their Beacon days. If their first-born children were of differing sexes, then if the girl did not find a partner at Beacon then she would have first priority in marriage candidates for the boy, if they were on at least friendly terms. There were reasons after all that the parents had introduced Weiss and Krom to each other at a young age as playmates and allowed them to spent time together once they'd become friends.

"I hope he can go beyond looks too, but there's a limit where society would just see you as a bad joke…" The woman sighed and picked her pen up again, going back to her paperwork and shutting the video feed off.

* * *

_The Next Morning_

Krom stared as Amber crawled around the bookshelf to the door of their room, she didn't bother reacting until he spoke. "Why aren't you wearing your legs?"

"Don't feel like hanging them up in the shower rooms." She replied, her towel hung around her neck along with a fresh set of underwear. "I can always wash my hands and scrub my knees again later, but taking them off and putting them back on in the shower rooms would be too difficult. Usually I do this at night but we already had showers coming back from Initiation, so it'll be in the morning today."

"Oh…"

After Amber came back from the shower and put her prosthetics back on, Nutmeg stopped the group just before they were about to leave for breakfast in the dining hall. "Hold on, guys, we need to decide which ranged fighter will pair up with which melee fighter just in case they spring something on us at breakfast. I fight with rifle and SMG, so I don't have a preference, Amber has sniping capability but she also employs shotgun work, so I don't think you'd have a preference for longer or shorter melee reach…"

"Nope. Let me guess, coin flip?"

Nutmeg rummaged in her pocket for such an implement "Sounds agreeable. So, you're heads, Amber, and I'm tails. Which of you two wants to go first?" She extended the coin toward the two males.

Krom had his hand out for the coin already while Talon looked a bit less comfortable "Shouldn't we operate as one big fire team? I mean, we're only four people, no need to divide our strength even further in combat." The steel-grey-haired young man drew his hand back one sentence into his friend's protest as he realized the same thing, but the frown meant he had other thoughts too.

"I suppose that's appropriate, but in case we do need to split up for an operation, we need to be very familiar with our partner's capabilities and style and match ours with theirs. It's very possible given Amber's our sniper or artillery, she needs a close guard, and I'm an assault trooper more or less, but need support when I'm reloading. So…" Nutmeg smiled as Talon extended his hand with a nod of submission and she dropped the coin into his palm. "Go on…"

"Amber first, and I'm heads for us two…" Talon smirked a bit and Krom rolled his eyes before Talon flipped the coin.

Amber lazily watched the coin arc through the air and fall, landing tails up. "Whelp, that settles the partnerships." She concluded, before scooping up the coin and tossing it back to Nutmeg, who caught it equally lazily and pocketed it.

* * *

Thankfully, Amber had designed enough padding into the soles of her feet to make herself not sound like some manner of walker as she strode along with the rest of her team toward the dining hall. Unfortunately, the annoying uniform skirt still left her legs exposed, people still did double-takes, and in one case someone clothe-lined on the arm of a friend who had been making animated gestures while talking to someone else. Amber saw it all, and noted the Gifted girls around wincing just looking at the pale scar tissue that was clearly visible on her and her partner's legs. Nutmeg seemed indifferent, not holding her head high but not shrinking in shame either, which was perhaps befitting a tactician who was interested in making a good first impression but didn't want to seem proud and possibly arrogant.

Amber realized too late, upon noting her friend's behaviour, that she'd been a nail sticking out for a while with how she not only stood a full head above the average of the crowd walking with her legs practically straight—even taller than that Lie Ren fellow they'd met yesterday, or that Cardin Winchester brute—but had her chest puffed up and head held high. She needed to change her posture to one of greater humility, an unassuming posture, if she were to not get picked by a professor as a "volunteer" for some sort of class-level initiation. The best way to do that… and to get herself out of the public eye was… to collapse inward on herself, let her shoulders sag slightly and drawing them forward a bit, lowering her eyes slightly and adjusting her walking posture. While not putting strain on her knees as slunking with her head at an altitude below the crowd would have done, this allowed her to only stick half a head over the average height, and that meant most people would hopefully think she'd just been putting on an act of confidence but in fact was less certain of herself. Sure, it might attract bullying, but she could handle that and had her own crew to back her up, and it would keep her out of a professor's attentions long enough for her to determine if the professor was worth sucking up to or not.

* * *

Amber and Krom were both zoning out in the front row on the left side of the center aisle of the classroom. _Is this a test? I'm not surprised someone's doodling… This is about the most narcissistic thing I've ever heard in my life… ugh…_ Her brain was proverbially dazed, complete with moronic drooling, as the professor rambled on about some achievement or another of his. _Hey, it's Ruby, Weiss, Yang and Blake._ She noted idly. _Wow, Weiss seems to be getting pretty irritated at what Ruby's doing… balancing your book and apple on a pencil in the front row? Really?_

"The moral of this story? A true huntsman must be honourable, a true huntsman must be dependable. A true huntsman must be strategic," Amber mentally snorted _Well I suppose Ruby fails thanks to picking her nose while in the front row, unless her objective is to give the illusion of idiocy. If so… you're succeeding Ruby, cause Weiss looks like she's about to wrap her hands around your scrawny neck and squeeze._ "well-educated, and wise. So, who among you believes themselves to be the embodiment of these traits?"

Weiss's highly irritated hand shot up to get her away from Ruby "I do, sir!"

The professor seemed unfazed by all the behaviour in the first row. "Well then, let's find out… step forward, and face your opponent." He gestured to the large steel crate/cage that had been sitting at one end of the front of the room for some time, from which growling emanated once in a while. Amber was suddenly very glad she had not volunteered, because her usual choice of weapons was a bit too fast for most Gifted to react to the explosive splash damage and/or shrapnel if they weren't already tensed and ready. Also, she needed her armour to use any of her heavier weapons effectively. Unless this was another Deathstalker—_I still prefer just calling it a giant scorpion_—then it should not require heavy weapons to take down, given he couldn't have fit any of the larger and more often seen Grim fliers in that crate—_The Nevermore is the most often seen and the largest, contrary to trends of most animal species in the food chain… then again it could just be that the others are more stealthy and wary of people… but he couldn't possibly have fit one in there…_

Amber felt for the pistol she carried in the holster Nutmeg had given her that morning as she was putting her own holster away. She unfolded it and took off the lock on the safety just in case. Nutmeg winked at her, showing she was doing the same. Krom and Talon had both noticed and glanced down briefly before smirking slightly. "Weiss can handle it." Krom murmured to Amber.

"I know she can, or she wouldn't be here, still, always have a back-up plan and exit strategy."

"And do you have an exit strategy?"

"I have exactly one grenade with me, it will have to do. All we have to do is ram it down the thing's throat after the lever flies off. I hope it's dumb enough to instinctively catch it in its mouth once I throw if the pistols cannot subdue it."

"Sounds too dangerous, I'll handle the thing if for whatever reason Weiss screws up and her team-mates are too busy laughing." Krom said, patting her on the shoulder and ignoring her jaw tensing in irritation at the perceived slight before she relaxed and nodded acceptance.

* * *

"Nah, she's got it." Amber snatched Krom's hand down from where it had flown to the pommel of his sword, thinking _Weiss didn't carry a sidearm? What is wrong with her? Especially given an easily-trapped main armament like a rapier… Then again that thing is quite versatile from what I've seen of it in action, so maybe she didn't feel the need to weigh herself down with too much gear. Not even a flak jacket from what I can see, but then again with her Gift she doesn't need that much extra protection._

"But…"

Nutmeg smirked "You know her, you have known her for quite some time." She said as Weiss dived out of the way of the charging critter and dashed for her rapier.

"Yes, she's my best female friend."

Amber hummed at that tidbit of knowledge "Well, I suppose that would tell me where you went last night when we kicked you guys out. Did you find her?" The critter's rolling attack was met with a conjured barrier, knocking it onto its back with the slight elasticity of the barrier.

Krom nodded "Yep." Apparently, Weiss still needed a slight boost to penetrate the tough hide of the underside of the Grim equivalent of a boar with her weapon without a space to charge in, Amber noted. _That's not a good sign for her raw physical power output._ Granted, Amber herself required aiming for weak, unarmoured points to punch through with her bayonets, but she didn't need (nor could she really use) extra boosts to cut through unless the stab was to align the barrel of her gun with the target._ Then again she is a slender, slight girl compared to me, holding advantages in mobility over my firepower and defence focuses, though overall vastly superior to me thanks to the power of her Gift unless engaging at long range._ She flexed her arm muscles without moving her hands, then she noticed another detail she'd previously missed. _What sort of rapier would have a fluted, relatively short tip section like that with a long, solid shaft? Oh right… how else would she project energy weapon blasts through it? Stupid thought…_

Apparently the class was just about over—too bad they couldn't just wear their combat gear all over the place or Weiss wouldn't have taken two minutes to go change for an under-one-minute fight. Then again the Prof would likely have ended the class even if the white-themed girl had just stepped forth and killed the damned thing, since it wasn't that much of a time difference until when the period should have ended. Besides, like any other post-secondary education facility, the first couple periods of each class at Beacon were, like the same start of year periods in earlier schooling, effectively a joke. But the joke was but a fleeting dream, a dream from which the students would soon awaken, to find themselves drowned in a greater nightmare.

* * *

_Some time later that day, elsewhere in Beacon Academy_

"Ruby, I've made more mistakes than any man, woman or child on this planet…" _Yes, my mistakes began with having faith in the system that existed, the status quo, when I was young. They only grew greater and more lethal for those too innocent to see it as I rose through the ranks, putting down dissidents and rebellions before word could spread. Now, it is even worse as every year I must make so many of these same mistakes so that a few of the Ungifted can potentially escape the lethal net of the Ruling Families by joining them. Even then, often it is a mistake as the other Ungifted dissidents, what few survive long enough, often target them first to hurt the Gifted families who they have married into._ "…but at this moment I do not consider your appointment as leader to be one of them." _Just as I do not think it wrong of me to have encouraged that young man to pursue the affections of the White Fire back in the day… even though her daughter's being a lot more spoilt and bratty than she would have let her be. At least the White Fire lived longer than she would have otherwise, and she was happy, until that night attack on the Schnee Residence cut that short._

* * *

_Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late September, 597 AD_

Krom's blade flashed in the light of the sparring chamber as he brought it down with both hands upon Amber's sniper-crutch which was held by the long, straight barrel side with the curving outside used to parry. She staggered under the brute force of the blow plus the recoil from slamming her SMG-crutch forward in a stabbing motion which she'd begun about the same time as Krom had fully committed to his overhand swing. The bayonet was retracted and a fake plastic one mounted on the tip of the weapon, but Krom's sidestep and grab attempt at the section of tubing beyond the blade was still unsuccessful since without full use of his Aura he wasn't fast enough to act before Amber yanked the weapon back, her left prosthetic foot hitting the ground at the same time as she restabilized against his sword smash's recoil.

The open-palmed blow to her left shoulder, that had just whipped back in the retraction of the crutch, was absorbed by a spin which Krom pressed to his advantage, pushing the battle closer to Amber before her SMG crutch whipped around enough to deflect his longsword's renewed advance once it was free of her sniper crutch. Still, he'd gotten inside her defences and they both knew it. The fist that came barrelling at her already crooked nose, however, was not met by an attempt to dodge when her head began to move to one side but rather a whipped redirection that sent it glancing off one of her cheekbones at an angle that would only bruise while she kicked out with her left leg and stabbed the sniper crutch in her right hand forward. There wasn't much force in the stab but then again she didn't exactly have her full balance and it was meant as a distraction. It didn't work, he managed to catch her leg sweep and take her legs out from under her while shoving forward, flattening his blade against the outer edge of her SMG crutch that was holding it back and slamming into her left shoulder with his right, sending her bracing back harshly with her right leg before he fully yanked her left out from under her. Twisting her SMG crutch to make his blade slide down its outside and hit him with the point failed since he had a counter ready, forcing her weapon up over his head as he dropped his own blade and double-punched her in the chest.

The end result was Amber being thrown flat on the ground and Krom wincing as he held his longsword at her for a moment before she tapped the ground three times in a row, ceding defeat. "I have to remember not to use my fists so much next time against the armour you wear. Even though you're just wearing the torso plates right now, it still hurts to slam against them with my Aura not at full power."

"Hah, with my usual armour scheme and without Aura you wouldn't have been able to crack my shell enough with your sword before I could land a telling blow."

Krom winced at the painful memories "Don't remind me." Thus far their score in the Aura-restricted spars that they'd agreed to do was sitting at five to two in Amber's favour. However, if Krom was allowed to use his Aura fully (most of their spars were supposed to be "no holds barred save lethality") it was usually over within three bouts, as soon as she was unable to dodge a direct hit that she couldn't turn into a brief aerial journey or forced roll, Amber was done for. Scores in spars where Aura had been allowed stood at seventeen to three between the two, in Krom's favour.

After most of those Aura-permitted bouts, be they with Krom or Talon, Amber had been forced to limp, stagger or trudge into the Armoury to repair her armour. Usually the spall liner needed patching after taking so many hits. She'd installed an improved spall liner inside the main plating and reworked the plating scheme to accommodate after one spar needed a bit of careful tweezer work (and much grumbling about how she was lucky she'd kept a bit of body fat on or she'd be worse off) to take the shattered bits of shrapnel embedded up to half a centimetre into the surface of her abdomen when Talon had whacked her at full power with the aura-enhanced flat of one of his short swords.

She knew the implications, if it had been a proper, non-tournament killing attempt she'd have been cut through at least halfway, definitely a fatal wound unless she was Gifted, she herself was specialized for healing, someone extremely close to her and used to her Gift was specialized for the same, and said someone was very, very available at the time. Amber failed the very first condition, so if she'd been hit like that in real fighting her entrails would have decorated the ground and she'd have been sent home in a body bag shortly thereafter. _False, Amber, if anything like that happened we'd take the bastards with us, a la grenades and the rest of our explosives, no body bag required, maybe a mop or vacuum cleaner, but that's about it._ Her killer instinct chastised her.

There was a smacking noise, a loud crack, and a minute later as Amber and Krom stared, Nutmeg dragged a rather dazed Talon out of their sparring ring. She was spewing admonishments at the guy who usually stood half a head taller than her, lecturing him on the use of rifle butts since in the moment that Talon had channelled his Gift toward the offence his defence had weakened enough for Amber to crack the plastic of her rifle butt against his head, literally given there was a pale crack running down the side. Normally it would've just sent him crashing to the ground, but his Gift shoving back had apparently repelled the immensely powerful blow hard enough to crack the plastic of the compactable assault rifle's extendable stock. It was… a somewhat ominous sign that Nutmeg might need to rethink her weapon design to be more durable. Granted, enough force still got through to hurt Talon, but still…

A bruise was beginning to form on Nutmeg's left cheek and there was a small cut above her right eye oozing drops of bright red blood as Amber and Krom moved over. "Can you… thanks." Krom had grabbed his friend and taken his weight off Nutmeg as she reached for her medical kit.

"I'm not disabled you know." Talon grunted, pushing himself upright and started walking, taking a couple steps before managing to walk without his legs wobbling.

"Why was she aiming at your head anyways, isn't that a bit dangerous?" Krom asked with a deep frown at Nutmeg, which then turned to Talon given Nutmeg's head injury.

"I provoked her into doing anything and everything necessary to win, I elbowed her in the face instead of the punches that would have been more in line with not being risky." Elbows were more likely to squash an eyeball… "That was when she changed her mind, managed to catch me in a gap in my attack pattern I'd left open to goad her, taking me by surprise with how hard she hit me. My left sword nicked her forehead a bit when I went flying. The aura dulling the blade had failed with me being so stunned, so her dodge was most fortuitous…"

"Makes perfect sense, I suppose, though I'm still surprised you let a rifle butt get to you so easily." Krom smirked.

Talon rolled his eyes "I seem to remember someone being sore about the boot-mark on his ass last week, or his broken nose the week before that." That had been when they'd decided to not go all-out in spars, since armoured glove meeting face generally wasn't healthy for the recipient when his aura wasn't calibrated for defences and he didn't pre-sense her due to her effectively complete lack of emissions.

"Foot, not boot, if you want to be technical about it, it's just a composite foot. Yes it has armour but that's not a boot cause my foot's not in there. My feet are long gone now, discarded in some incinerator or something at the hospital I was admitted to after that landslide." Amber muttered while she was putting on her arm plates. "You boys trash us badly enough in real spars, you can spare a pittance for our sense of self-worth during our Gift-restricted spars."

"Only Krom and I get to be beaten up regularly without our Auras to help us, none of the other teams do this sort of thing." Talon grumbled as he rubbed at his still aching head. "But I suppose it DOES help our pain tolerance quite a bit."

"That's the spirit." Amber patted his back a couple times before he fended her off, wincing at the vibrations it was putting through his pounding head.

"I'll need to go make a new stock for my rifle…" Nutmeg bemoaned the chore.

"How about this time use a more weapons-grade material instead of that cheap plastic you used before?"

"But those materials tend to be denser… and without the Gift I can't do all the amazing stuff Ruby can…" Nutmeg had nearly turned green with envy on seeing Ruby with her scythe deployed in double-barrelled double-loading assault cannon mode as opposed to usual joined-barrel single-loading large-calibre sniper mode, her Gift combined with probably some level of antigravity system allowing her to hold the grossly front-heavy weapon with not a care for balance. "I'll see if I can come up with something to cut down on the weight then, other than weakening it by hollowing it out, even a honeycomb would be only strong in certain directions…" Nutmeg frowned, sinking into thought. Talon sighed with a small smile and rolled his eyes as she avoided walking into a column at the very last moment. Then his face changed to a "not amused" look when she turned her head enough to show her own smirk, which said _yes, I was trolling you, and you fell for it_.

"I suppose I should be very glad Amber doesn't usually troll me the way Nutmeg trolls you, hmm Talon?" Krom said.

"What's the point? It doesn't help us survive these Beacon years or anything, does it?"

"Loosen up a bit, Amber, enjoy life while it lasts."

"The last time I enjoyed my life while it lasted, I ended up cutting a couple body parts loose for good. Losing body mass isn't as fun as some people like to think, be it directly or from muscles shrinking from disuse… Took me months to recover most of my muscle mass after leaving hospital…" Amber rolled her head a couple times to loosen her muscles a bit. "Ugh, that feels better… back to work guys, we got assignments to turn in."

* * *

A/N: Amber's response to this me putting her in this situation (hooking her up with Krom), after learning of this arrangement between the two families, would be "Krom, I'm taking you to an optometrist… or maybe a mental institution, you are clearly in need of help if you fail this hard in sight, touch, hearing, smell and, both literally and figuratively, overall taste. If you have a thing for scars, you need even more help. Me being a new, fresh conquest doesn't justify such apparent stupidity."

**Reviews?** (Ruby would use her eyes on you if she was a main character here, but Nutmeg isn't that good at puppy eyes, and Amber EPIC fails with all her hideous scars and indifference to her disfigurements)

**Weiss's Mother's Trailer is the next chapter since 100% of the 1 person who expressed an opinion wanted her to be alive and in this story.**


	7. TRAILER: This Time It's Different!

A/N: MEleesSmasher, you were the one vote out of one that ensured I'd at least make a character trailer for Silver. She and Ashe are both removable if you readers deem them unnecessary. Please be advised that these are the words I hear (not quite the official lyrics) when I listen to the song as per this music video on YouTube: **"World of Tanks Music Video | Evans Blue - This Time It's Different 1080p HD" This video is 9001% GODLY editing, though it's an epileptic's nightmare, watch it if you are healthy enough to take the awesomeness.**

Be advised, **WEISS'S Secondary Theme** will be **Red Like Roses Part II** (yes, I sort of ship Pink) thanks to what she was told about Silver. Thankfully, putting Silver in gave me an outlet for the lyrics, otherwise one of them would have to die/go AWOL as they will in canon at some point. Even though everyone (except Kane) does die in the end of the story… (Epilogue involves time skips up to and maybe even beyond 102,000 years in the future from this point, you tell me if they'd still be around… perhaps in spirit but not as these same people anymore).

* * *

Character Trailer: This Time It's Different!

Characters: White Fire, Grey Ashe (This is set to the Evans Blue song that is the title of the trailer)

***music***

(In black, white, and red until further notice) An adolescent silver-haired white-clad red-eyed girl with her hair cropped to just above her neck sat with a grim, imperious expression at her seat on the airship (near a port-side window row/aisle) and watched the fairy-tale-castle-esque towers of Beacon come closer, right hand on the hilt of her rapier and left rested just over her left shoulder on the top rim of the large oval shield strapped to her back, a nametag reading "Silver Grant" can be seen attached on the inside of the shield near the top over her right shoulder (nearest the Camera's perspective).

**Let—**

Flashes to her being launched from the launch pads on Beacon Cliff and pulling her shield out for use as a hover-board.

—**GO!**

…**This time it's different!  
**

Shows her stopping her downward progress in a clearing and hopping off before deactivating the anti-gravity and grabbing the main strap with her hand.

**I'm burning up!  
I'm filling up! See?  
**

She pulls a canister from her skirt, yanks the pin out and tosses it toward the creature's maw as she rolls out of the way of a python attack, firing a burst of heat from her rapier at a second python as the first begins to thrash about, steam pouring from its mouth as the incendiary grenade burns a hole through its lower jaw.

**Forever plagued with this fire inside me!  
**

She kills the first with a stab through its eye before taking a blow from the second on her shield and rolling to a stop a dozen meters away, springing back up with a maniacal grin, her face and clothes specked with bright crimson blood and her red eyes shining brightly.

**Deliver all, to live holed up by me,  
It's empty, it's nothing, defining but nothing.**

(In Black, White, Red and Blue) She sees that the second snake is already engaged with a white-haired, blue-eyed boy in a pale jacket and narrows her eyes, leaping to the attack with a shout. (Subtitle: It's MY kill!) Camera flies to the boy's face as he gets distracted for a moment by the shout and is sent flying by a tail lash.

**Interfering with the call of fate is crawling out of you and now  
**

The camera cuts to an elderly headmaster who smile slightly seeing the two meet and looking up toward the sky, thinking. (Subtitle: I hope she makes it in… for her survival.)

**Finding comfort in the smallest spaces have sold out  
**

Flashes forward, shows the boy standing over her frowning as she sleeps with her head rested on her desk and books.

**I know I said  
I hope I don't upset the light you defend  
**

Shows the young man and two other adolescents, one greyish-themed male and one yellow and orange-themed female, essentially dragging her out of their dorm room.

**But this time it's different!  
Destroy… my pain…**

Cuts to the other two playing tennis while she sulks and the white-themed boy comes over, extending a racquet toward her with a grin.

**Then capture life again  
(This time it's different)  
**

Shows her looking over at the two who are laughing over rupturing their fifth tennis ball with their Aura-enhanced strokes, shaking her head with a grimace/smirk, and getting up, grabbing the racquet and marching past the white-themed boy who falls in line.

**Destroy… my shame…  
Can't live my life this way**

Flashes forward (STILL in mostly B&W with splashes of colour for their hair and eyes) to the four of them exiting a roller coaster together, grinning like buffoons.

**LET! Go, GO! let go!  
And capture life again!  
**

Flashes forward again to the four of them in a restaurant in two pairs, chatting away, Silver laughs at something the white-themed boy says.

**LET! Go, GO! let go!  
Can't live my life this way!**

Flashes forward (now in colour) to the young woman with a hand on the edge of a small cradle with a white-haired girl sleeping inside. She is in a rather plain-looking bedroom, frowning and clutching reflexively at her hip for her rapier when a bald, tired-looking man, Kane, opens the door.

**I'm giving up  
I'm living but weak  
**

(Flashes back to mostly-dulled colours) Shows the young woman's hand, shaking, clutching her rapier as she falls to her knees, several smears of red decorating her front but refusing to lie down and die.

**I'm hearing voices from shadows inside me**

The white-themed young man, now somewhat older-looking, shakes his head and says, tears falling from his chin. His mouth is moving in slow motion, but Silver hears (subtitles) "Your story is not yet over, White Fire."

**I never sleep—  
**

She fumbles before gripping her rapier tightly again, cracking open a hidden clutch and popping off the gem at the end of the pommel, before jamming her finger into the button inside.

—**My eyes are too focused—**

The camera cuts to the young man's ice-blue eyes widening in shock in the top half of the screen and the bottom half with her red eyes narrowed in defiance and the subtitle. The subtitles say "You will never get to hurt my Weiss."

—**too hopeless, too broken, too open, to notice.**

Scene cuts to the young man diving for cover as the rapier hilt's transparent parts begins to glow red and the tip ejects a stream of seemingly corrosive green liquid onto a Dust sculpture, which begins to glow. The young woman, now with one hand over a wound in the left side of her abdomen, stares blandly as the charging sequence completes, not noticing the soft gold rings surrounding her body.

**Interfering with the call of fate is crawling out of you, and now**

Left side cuts to a wing of the mansion blowing up and the right side to Kane supervising a number of medical machines working on the unconscious woman's wounds.

**Finding comfort in the smallest spaces have sold out**

Flashes forward to the woman awakening and narrowing her eyes at Kane, who is looking rather grim as he speaks (subtitles: "You're pregnant with his second daughter.")

**I know I said  
I hope I don't upset the light you defend  
**

Flashes forward to Kane speaking to her, the young woman looking down at her daughter for a moment before nodding resolutely.

**But this time it's different!  
**

Scene cuts to the young woman, now in power armour, stabbing a sniper in the back of the head while he's lining up a shot on a young orange-haired teenager (this is Amber) skipping along with two shopping bags.

**Destroy… my pain…  
Then capture life again!  
(This time it's different)  
**

Scene cuts to the young woman giving a man wearing a mask (Adam) a briefing (photos, a schedule, etc.) over an Order of Nations restricted supplies train that is to be making a run nearby in the near future. Adam nods and exits the room where they are meeting after accepting the documents.

**Destroy… my shame…  
Can't live my life this way!  
**

Cuts to the woman ruffling her now teenaged daughter's hair after a sparring session, both sweating and with their blades sheathed, exiting a sparring chamber. The young girl is clad in a silvery theme, unlike her mother's mostly white theme. Her hair however is snow-white (like her father's) instead of silvery like her mother and sister (think initial reveal art for Weiss though still with blue eyes instead of grey as on that art).

**LET! go, GO! let go  
And capture life again**

Shows the woman on a mission encountering Team RWBY, freezing up slightly, then being sent flying as she takes a downward smash from Weiss as she shouts "This is for my mother, you soulless terrorists!" She frantically holds Weiss off with her own rapier, an exact mirror of Weiss's, until she gets teleported away, just as Ruby, Yang and Blake finish off all of the grunts that had been gathered there. Weiss looks confused in the aftermath and looks her weapon over curiously.

**LET! go, GO! let go  
Can't live my life this way**

Shows the woman sitting in her clothes in the shower against a wall, with her knees hugged to her chest and her soaked hair hiding her face. Shows her daughter, who looks much like a younger version of Weiss other than the short hair (like her mother) walking in with a large towel over her shoulder, turning off the water, pulling her mother up and starting to help her out of her soaked clothes, talking all the while to the numb older woman.

**Question everything…  
**

Flashes far back (mostly Black & White) to the white-themed young man clasping his hands around one of hers, asking the young woman something with a nervous look on his face and a subtle darkening of his cheeks.

**Question everything…  
**

She chuckles, then gapes before nodding quickly.

**Question everything…  
**

Flashes to the two leaning on each other, talking about stuff.

**Question everything…  
**

Flashes to the two at the altar before flashing back to present-day Silver, who shakes her head clear from the memories and sighs.

**I open my eyes,  
A voice inside me…**

Flashes to a montage of Weiss coming home looking glum, heading upstairs to her room, then staring at the name she'd re-branded her mother's old rapier with, closing her eyes with a grimace and nodding to herself.

**I open my mind…**

**But this time it's different!**

Shows Ashe and Silver fighting off a group of Order of Nations secret police, and Weiss cutting in to help them by killing one about to jump on them before Silver snipes down the last one who tried to run.

**Destroy… my pain…  
Then capture life again!  
(This time it's different)**

Flashes to Team RWBY, Team TANK, Ashe and Silver watch from a command center as street fighting rages in the City of Vale (capital of the Vale Continent) between tanks, walkers, and the infantry of both sides.

**Destroy… my shame…  
Can't live my life this way!  
**

Scene sweeps to Amber giving orders via gestures on the hologram and talking quickly to Silver, who is also giving orders to different units.

**LET! go, GO! let go  
And capture life again**

Cuts to armoured forces approaching the Schnee residence before camera flies out to showing Mr. Schnee about to evacuate before being smashed down by the white blur of Weiss who quickly dispatches the security guards. He looks betrayed, then enraged as he yanks his own rapier out.

**LET! go, GO! let go  
Can't live my life… this… WAAAAYYYYY!  
(I'm burning up, I'm living but)  
**

Scene flashes forward to Weiss, looking saddened, stabbing her father in the right side of his chest just after Silver, grimacing, puts a hole in his sword arm, causing him to drop his weapon. Ashe puts her own blade with a face full of hate into his back, cutting his spinal cord just below the hips, and he collapses.

**Can't live my life… this… WAAAAYYYYY!**

**(I'm burning up, I'm giving up)**

Weiss turns and walks away, Ashe keeps on glaring hatefully, her rapier held tight and twitching, and Silver crouches near him, showing him her hand with her ring. Subtitle from him: "Silver? I'm sorry… I'm sorry…" She shakes her head slowly as she stands again, dropping the ring on his face as she stands.

**Can't live my life… this… WAAYYY!**

Silver stands back to let Amber and Nutmeg level their guns at his head. Subtitle here reads: "I'm sorry too…" Camera cuts from the full scene to Silver's eyes. She squeezes her eyes shut as with the end of the music there is the bang of two guns being discharged at once. Scene and music cuts out to a brief, silent clip of Silver and Ashe standing near Team RWBY, Krom and Talon as Amber and Nutmeg speak from the podium on the City Hall balcony. Ashe looks proud and triumphant, Silver looks weary, and Weiss looks downcast. Ruby's hand is clasped on Weiss's shoulder and one of the silver-haired girl's hands covers it.

* * *

A/N: So, what did you think? I've left out some significant parts involving Weiss, Amber and Krom, but those aren't very Silver-centric so… yeah. As you can tell, bringing Silver and Ashe in will add a greater magnitude to the Schnee Schism between Weiss and her father, and you can tell the three females' opinions of the guy from where they stabbed him. Now do you understand why Mere Tenacity can survive a hit from a combat Mech (the "Giant Armour") so easily? _**It withstood a (admittedly relatively small) liquid Tiberium explosion at point-blank and was repairable enough to continue service**_**.**

**REVIEW! Tell me, should I bring Silver and Ashe in as characters or leave them out?**

First they came for those trying to survive on minimum wage, and I did nothing because I wasn't living hand-to-mouth on a minimum wage.  
Then they came for the sick who were too poor to buy treatment, and I did nothing because I wasn't sick.  
Then they came for the gays, and I did nothing because I was straight.  
Then they came for the pro-choice, and I did nothing because I was male and it wasn't my problem.  
Then they came for the rights of women, and I did nothing because I wasn't a woman.  
Then they came for me, and the world did nothing because they weren't me.  
Then they came for the rest of the world, and no one was left to save the world.

#DeathToTheRepubicanRight


	8. Blondes… and Associated Madness

A/N: About Port, well, it'll be shown in his next appearance that he is in fact not only very competent at teaching but also at dealing with personalities… Nutmeg will review the realization of why he chose to troll them in his first class. I'll be drawing parallels between Ozpin to Dumbledore and Goodwitch to McGonagall (you cannot convince me Monty was not at all inspired by JKR on the two), I can't tell who Port is parallel to yet (for all three professors' souls, and probably others too, the respawn button was probably mashed in the future, so we're basically seeing Dumbledore before he became "Dumb-odour", "Dumbass-dork" or any such thing).

And no, Port is NOT parallel to Binns, even though he is monumental in trolling ability when he wants to troll students to test them. I'd like to think him closer to Flitwick, at least for now—it's an interesting contrast between the rather large and… portly… man and the dwarf though—noting how both are played for fools in their first mentioned classes (please go review _Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone_ if you need to) but in fact are NOT.

* * *

Chapter 6: Blondes… and Associated Madness

(Yes, the chapter is titled BAM, and a lot of that will be happening here)

_Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, mid October, 597 AD_

The table emitted a disturbingly loud crack as Amber's spare gauntlet, over her un-bandaged hand, landed next to Jaune's tray, Team TANK had elected to put their customary dining locations next to where Team RWBY and Team JNPR sat, Krom and Talon generally getting on very well with the RWBY crew. Amber and Nutmeg were friendly enough with the JNPR crew… and "If bullying's the biggest problem you have to deal with, you have a very, very lucky life, Jaune. Someone bigger and stronger with better combat technique pushing you around doesn't mean anything, because through the power of machinery, there is nothing that cannot be torn down. In your case, since you HAVE an Aura, sheer determination and a lot of effort works too. Remember what happened when we got to do the demonstrations for tournament combat with Aura."

There was an awkward silence as they all thought back to Team TANK's attempt at battling Team RWBY earlier that day, or rather the surprisingly good fight Amber had put up before making an Amber-shaped hole in the auditorium stage.

* * *

_Earlier that morning…_

"The first set of tournament-style fighting demonstrations will be between…" Goodwitch waited for the random number generator to spit out the numbers "Teams TANK and RWBY!"

"We're fucked. Our best hope is an even match, two wins, two losses. Krom, Talon, you have to win, we're about to get raped in Person vs. Person combat…" Nutmeg grumbled in a near-monotone, pulling out her two main armaments and pushing the buttons that unfolded them before triggering the bayonet extensions. "Glad I installed a HUD app that can link to the Aura sensors in this school though."

"And I'm glad I put a proper HUD in my helmet, so I could get combat data too." Amber looked pointedly at Nutmeg's guns and then her own Broken Ember, indicating the magazine counters that came in the HUD. "So, who's going to stack up to who… Krom, I think you should get Weiss, you have the best chance of beating that ridiculous speed demon combat style since you know her and know how to counter her even though you're mildly slower than even me. That rapier would probably just cut through my armour since I don't have Aura to block her if she powers up her strikes… hopefully she won't if comes down to us facing off."

Talon and Krom shared a look at their forgetting to work on unlocking Amber and Nutmeg's Auras. "Alright, I'll take on Weiss, Talon, who do you think you'll engage?"

"Quick blade work that non Aura users cannot counter effectively, who does that sound like to you?"

"Blake then, great, I guess it'll be down to leader versus leader?" Amber eyed Ruby's scythe/assault cannon/sniper rifle with a grimace.

"How about shotgun versus shotgun instead?" Nutmeg suggested.

Amber raised her eyebrows "You think you can take Ruby?"

"Nope, but it's possible you could take Yang long enough to wear her down since you have greater reach."

"That's only if she doesn't start shooting, and we know just how much my 'greater reach' matters against Aura-based shotgun-type blasts and her reinforced punches."

"Let's flip a coin and be done with it, since it doesn't matter which of us gets owned by which of them."

* * *

A/N: The following fight sequence is partly inspired by "[RWBY]Maths With Yang" by "~Ryuzak1Katsuragi" on DeviantArt. Viewer discretion is advised.

* * *

_A moment later…_

Amber sighed as she twirled one of her highly weaponized crutches one last time, gripping it by the main tube/gun barrel just below the cross-guard which was a normal crutch's hand-grip but in this case included trigger assemblies. "Let's get this over with… Remember guys, any puddles of blood that's left by us should be exploited to their maximum potential."

"I doubt they'd let you draw blood before calling the match."

"Oh, we will leave blood, Nutmeg and I will leave blood, if the criteria are anything like I remember them being in other tournaments, they won't realize it's over until we go down and don't get back up, hence blood. Remember, when it's fresh it's very slippery, but give it a few minutes and it'll be kind of tacky… but gives out when you try to put too much weight on it. If it's almost completely dried it's mostly like normal floor but grip might be better than standard… until it flakes under your foot and you slip." Amber finished talking and ascended the stage where Yang waited, entering a combat stance. "No hard feelings, right? What about gunfire?"

"Melee-only please, the shield generators are down for repair at the moment… someone spilled coffee on a control panel and shorted them out." Goodwitch, as Deputy Headmistress, was quite entitled to glare at Ozpin who was wincing at the denouncement. "Hmm, the scanners appear to be in some need of repair too since they are reading No Signal from you, Miss Stone…" _It would be problematic if the students all knew that most people simply didn't have Auras, or at least so weak they're not noticeable… It would be nice if it didn't have to be this way, but such is the way the world goes._

"It doesn't matter, now let's get this smack-down over with. Here guys, take In Amber Clad and my heavy weapons ammo." Amber removed said items from her armour and handed them off to her friends before stepping back up to the stage.

"You sure? It'll be hard to gauge when you need to stop without a scanner readout…" Yang sounded concerned.

"We'll stop once I've been thoroughly incapacitated. I just want to get this over with as soon as possible."

"Okay then, I suppose…"

Amber's mental calculations quickly went over her advantages and disadvantages. _With no edge-based or point-based attacks, I can withstand a couple full-power hits from her gauntlets with my spall liner and the huge improvements I've made to my armour's shock dispersion layers…_ Those had come from painful sparring lessons involving being bodily hurled into nearby objects at high speed._ But after that another good hit in the same general area and I'll be out for the count. I can't move as fast as she can, and I'll need to be careful with that mane of hers since she gets immensely angry whenever someone pulls on it too hard or god forbid pulls a strand out. As long as she doesn't take me altogether too seriously, and doesn't rely on her Aura as much as she potentially could, I will have a slight advantage in total strength. From what I've seen of her in the gym she doesn't have a visible six-pack which means she's physically conditioned but not necessarily for alpha strike i.e. brute force the way I am. I also out-bulk her physically and given the much higher density of muscle than fat or glandular tissue probably outweigh her by about ten pounds, even minus my prosthetics and armour and even given she still has all her limbs. My crutches offer me better reach and a degree of added manoeuvrability with timely extension/retraction of the blades so that I can actually stilt off surfaces, and my prosthetics are acclimated and powered enough to do battle on even grounds… but that Aura is a crushing advantage. She will win this, but I won't shame my teammates by going down without a long, drawn-out, and exceedingly painful—for me—fight._

_If I don't start with the initiative, I will never get it with Yang's Aura helping her._ That last thought led to Amber making the first step forward with her right foot, drawing her right arm back slightly… and promptly using her left to parry Yang'a alpha strike which was aimed at her left crutch to knock it out of the fight and force her to bring her right forward so that Yang's backhand could take it out and leave her open. Amber countered by leaping back to bring herself out of the brawler's reach if only for a moment. _She's fucking fast… and adopts a Steamroller Strategy._

There was no respite as Yang followed, her left gauntlet swatting a block up and forcing Amber to let go long enough to both dodge the right hook and let the momentum of the initial swat swap her crutch into a backhanded position before grabbing hold again and letting Yang's long left punch strike the stock of her sniper crutch, evading the caving of that defence toward her chest by twirling herself to her right and leaping back, forcing Yang to turn to the her own left (Amber's right), to follow her. Yang's sweep toward her legs was countered by impaling the bayonet of the sniper weapon into the ground between them long enough to force the sweep to abort (or strike the blade ) before Amber yanked the bayonet out and jabbed her other toward Yang, prompting her to sidestep and grab the weapon before Amber could retract it. They were now stuck within brawling range, Yang's home territory.

_I'll just have to take a strike and force her to block, try to stagger her._ Amber thought as she was punched in the chest hard enough for there to be a cracking noise from her composite chest-plate. Yang had obviously recognized that kicking would offer a chance at a leg-grab that she couldn't afford at the moment since if Amber let go of her crutch she'd be in trouble from such a grab. Amber struck back with a kick that brought her right knee and foot into Yang's abdomen at the same time… then pushed off/down as hard as she could, essentially raking her foot over Yang's skin before shoving down and forward against the front of Yang's pelvis, which should tip the girl forward slightly and push her down at the same time. Yes, Amber absorbed a punch that spider-webbed her outer, primary visor, but it didn't quite shatter and she now had her opening since she'd managed to snag enough of a grip on Yang's free hand to not get her knee plate smashed in.

Even though Amber was no good at long, protracted high-intensity battles, preferring a healthy mix of tactics with occasional harsh bouts, her alpha was still more than high enough at this point in the battle to make Yang more than falter in her block as she gave the true blonde (with long, smooth hair, unlike her own ragged, stained orange-blonde mop) an uppercut. This sent Yang, despite a gauntlet block dampening the blow that still made her own gauntlet collide with her jaw, sailing backward off her feet briefly, losing her hold on Amber's weapon and backing up far enough for Amber's follow up to be a springing leap from her rear leg. The mechanical parts of the digitigrade prosthetic allowed a much longer jump than human leg anatomy would have. She retracted the blade of her sniper crutch, the one Yang hadn't previously grabbed, and slammed it downward toward Yang, who was about to spring back up. She did not expect Yang to use a punch to brace herself against the ground and reject the blunt weapon toward Amber's left. Amber abruptly saw her mistake in using too much risk-dampening as would have been needed in an Aura-less battle as she let the weapon spin leftward to flatten against Yang's chest as she brought her legs around to land on the girl.

With her Aura Yang could easily have endured a full downward stab and body smash… but Amber's realization came too late. She decided to let that weapon go and plough herself directly into Yang instead of being put through a spiralling descent, this pinned Yang's arms to her torso as Amber crashed onto it, her knees bent so she'd land on her feet and be able to spring off of her sniper crutch, which was stuck between her and Yang, ASAP. After that body slam that left Yang gasping as, despite blocking the landing on Ember Celica, still meant her arms had been rammed against her chest harshly for a moment, Amber bounced off before Yang could lash out and potentially force her to do a split which would completely wreck her mobility and allow Yang to give her body core strikes from below. She turned as Yang rolled and punched the ground to get herself back up as well, the bar above them showing Yang's Aura gauge still well in the green, probably around 85% or so, and Amber's still reading ERROR.

Yang snatched up Amber's lost weapon and threw it off the stage "In a real fight I would have tried to destroy it, but not here." She said with a couple deep breaths.

Amber couldn't afford to let her catch her second wind, she had yanked Broken Ember from her back "pack" and extended its bayonet, feeling very glad that her armour was powered enough to allow her to carry so much payload and remain close-combat-effective. She was moving to attack even before the bayonet was fully extended and locked into position, blocking one of Yang's punches with her crutch-wielding left hand holding the weapon like a shield, the impact shaking her arm hard enough even with the armour for her to feel it shaking all the way into her ribs. _Left glove toasted just like my visor, chestplate can endure one more hit, hopefully I'll be able to take the next hit on arms or abdomen…_ Leg hits were too much a risk in case a hit broke something, though maybe one being damaged slightly wouldn't be that bad of an issue given she still had a crutch left to lean on… she could afford taking one hit to a leg, and only one hit. She attacked on her right side, but the bayonet tip merely bounced off Ember Celica's exterior without inflicting so much as a scratch since Yang had blocked so quickly. Amber's next block didn't quite come in time as Yang kicked her hard enough in the codpiece to emit a cracking noise, but she did manage to clamp Yang's leg between her own and started smashing away with her left fist, weapon discarded, at the lighter girl's kneecap, ignoring how bits of the cracked exterior plate of her glove were shedding off with every punch she threw.

Yang was still hopping somewhat to regain her balance as Amber twisted her stance to force Yang to move her other foot to not topple over so she couldn't counter-attack yet… _Oops, wrong assessment._ Amber thought suddenly as Yang let herself fall and yanked forward on her trapped leg while kicking out with her other, kicking Amber's prosthetic feet backward while towing her hips forward, making her fall toward Yang's waiting fist. Amber brought her Broken Ember up to block the blow, but Yang managed to turn her right hook into a feint and, after hitting the ground with her back, give a left haymaker fast enough that Amber couldn't counter. Amber grabbed for purchase instinctively with her left hand as she began to fly off of Yang.

There was only one problem with this, well, two problems put together, but that wasn't the point.

One, Yang's hair was long enough to reach her butt. Therefore, when she was lying on her back, grabbing at one of her upper arms had an extremely high probability of grabbing a good handful of hair, even if you missed the arm.

Two, Amber was not gifted with enough luck to win lotteries.

The conclusion was that in addition to grabbing onto Yang's upper arm Amber also managed to grab onto a good handful of long, luxurious blonde hair fibres.

In the audience, Weiss winced, Blake looked away, and Ruby covered her eyes with a small whimper of sorrow as Yang looked rather slowly down at where the heavier girl had grabbed, then looked up at her again, before her irises' unusual property kicked in. The pigments were subject to enzyme control which turned them red when enough hormones indicating rage were present in the bloodstream. Well, they were red now, and Amber only had a moment to think _Uh oh_ before Yang punched the inside of her arm that had grabbed onto Yang's arm. The punch was harsh enough to crack the plating on the first blow, and Amber tried to pull back her numbed and opened hand only to find her arm captured in Yang's grip, which seemed to have multiplied far beyond Amber's own grip strength. The curvier blonde then wrenched the offending appendage a hundred and eighty degrees to Amber's left, spraining her wrist as the girl twisted to avoid breaking her arm joints. Yang grinned, baring her all-natural teeth before grabbing Amber by her upper arm as well and turning slightly. Amber felt herself get yanked off the feet and had only a moment to be glad she'd installed plenty of shock dampening hardware before being smashed back-first into the stage.

Then the smack-down Amber had predicted began in earnest. Yang kicked Amber back up to a near-standing position, then kicked her hard enough to launch her in the air before she could even land on her feet to gain some traction to manoeuvre with. Then the true blonde launched herself into the air after her adversary and launched a string of punches at her opponent's back in such a way as to give Amber a thorough beating as she was turned over slowly in mid-air under the barrage. The orange-blonde managed to deflect or block about half the attacks once she'd managed to help Yang turn herself over enough, but there were too many… too… many.

Finally, Yang grabbed Amber, slowing her upward movement slightly, and reached the peak of her Aura-assisted scent, just above Amber's back, and finished with the traditional finish this position demanded. She blasted herself off the ceiling with two punches, planted her feet on Amber's back "pack", and spiked downward. After the impact which left an Amber-shaped hole in the wooden floor of the stage and shook dust from the curtains, Yang bounded out of the hole and scratched at her head, blinking a few times as her rage faded before…

"Oh god… Amber, you okay? Amber?"

There was no response and a frisson of whispers went through the auditorium as Glynda Goodwitch, looking rather grim, noted on her panel that Yang was not to be selected for any more sparring competitions with someone who didn't at least have an Aura the sensors could pick up. She sincerely hoped the other students had all learnt the number one lesson of the blonde: never mess with her hair, or… well… Beacon would be in for a lot of repair bills.

Then there was a muffled sound and the auditorium fell silent. Yang knelt by the hole and shouted into it "What did you say?"

There was the sound of retching before Amber screamed her reply "I SAID 'I TOLD YOU SO'!" That shout was followed by the sound of some wet-sounding coughing and a couple hacks before a loud spitting could be heard "Oh… sorry, school janitor, bout the mess!"

The caretaker had walked onto the stage once the dust settled and began to inspect the damage "I'd be more likely to ask Miss Xiao-Long for an apology and make her fix the floor, you know."

There was some more coughing "So dusty down here… help me out will ya? I want to give my thrusters an inspection before using them again." A hand with rivulets of fresh blood on it, clad in a tattered black glove with splinters of plating still clinging to it, reached over the edge of the hole and Yang reached her hand out to give Amber a lift. "You might want to use a broom and then a vacuum cleaner, caretaker, I left a lot of armour fragments down there…"

Thankfully, Amber's visor's shatter-resistant properties meant that she only received minor lacerations to the areas of her face not covered by her safety goggles after impacting the floor of the sub-stage area which was used for special effects during performances. The damaged parts of her armour had almost all shattered under the strain of impact while the formerly undamaged areas were severely cracked. Fortunately the impact resistance layers inside prevented her from being splattered around the inside of the plating, but even with the dampening it was still painful and had contributed to the armour breaking as it was thinner than it looked.

She trudged over to her discarded weapons and picked them up before heaving toward the side of the stage "I'm going to have to rebuild a whole set of armour while I wear my spares… I hope the school covers that cost given I don't have a damned Aura to screen myself and my equipment with and you still insisted on pitting my team against hers." She said quietly to Glynda as she limped by, one prosthetic leg leaking hydraulic fluid and sparking occasionally, before that leg gave out completely and she tumbled down the stairs off the stage, catching herself with her hands with a hiss of pain and getting back up before her team mates could rush to her side. "I'm okay, I'll live, just another lesson learnt." She switched her SMG crutch to the correct hand and pulled herself back up with the edge of the stage before stumping on out of the auditorium to the locker rooms. Blood was dripping off once in a while from an oozing wound on the palm of her other hand, where a piece of composite armour had embedded itself into the calloused skin before she'd pulled it out.

Yang watched the other blonde stagger off, biting her lip, before looking up at her Aura gauge, which had dropped to a sickly green-yellow after passing the 80% mark but before the 60% mark where it would have turned full yellow. Amber's had shifted from Error to reading, in large red letters Undefined. Raking her mind for a moment, Yang realized what that meant mathematically speaking, and, from the many gasps in the audience, so had quite a few people. _For someone without an active Aura… you fought exceedingly well, Amber Stone. I hope you forgive me for this incident. Friends… like we were before this and like I hope we still are, shouldn't act toward each other like I did toward you just now._

"The event of the full team rotation battles, it seems, is to be delayed until patch repairs can be made to the stage. However, we can still demonstrate the value of Aura use in battle by picking two people who have fully activated Auras. This should result in less… environmental damage, shall we say." Glynda looked glum as she said this, noticing that Team TANK had all disappeared from the room following the trail of cracked white ceramic and occasional drops of bright crimson blood. Team RWBY seemed to be debating whether or not to leave and looked very uncomfortable, especially Yang.

* * *

_Back to Lunchtime…_

The reconciliation had consisted of Yang apologizing a bunch while Amber laughed and waved it off as "Such is combat, sides I had an extra pair of prosthetic legs ready anyhow… and if it came down to it I could always crawl or crutch-walk around the school fast enough to keep up with the crowds, and my other set of armoured gloves would keep my fingers from being crushed if I crawl. Sides, thanks for holding back and letting me do some damage." She had been wincing as she laughed, which was pulling at the cuts on her face, a face that was currently patchy with bandages. Yang had looked slightly uncomfortable at that, since she had initially been fighting relatively casually though still hitting at full power… resulting in things going in Amber's favour until she touched Yang's fuse. Yang knew that Amber was a strong fighter who could in fact stack up to her unless she was completely serious about the fight and used some of the special techniques of her arsenal.

"So, about the Vytal tournament…" Nutmeg decided to change the subject.

"Not even thinking about it, no Aura means I'll be at best a glass cannon in those no-holds-barred slugfests, worse than earlier today." Amber said smoothly "Jaune, build up your strength in secret, let Pyrrha tutor you, she's the best combat Aura user I've seen, come to me if you need an arsenal of cheap tricks and gimmicks. A crushing public defeat followed by thorough trouncing when he tries to come after you afterward usually scares these people into submission."

"Don't worry about it, it's not like he's just a jerk to me, he's a jerk to everyone." Jaune motioned with his eyes over to where Cardin Winchester had a hold on one of the ears of a Fauna girl that Amber couldn't remember the name of but who she knew Team Cardinal had been lounging around for the past little while, most likely harassing her the whole time.

"That's cause he hasn't been put in his place yet, although putting him in his place may entice larger and larger attacks of retribution and an obsession with vengeance. It's just a matter of waiting until he pisses off the wrong people." Nutmeg opined, suddenly realizing a shocking development. "Wow, he actually stopped after she said 'please stop'… I'm surprised, granted he'd already proven his point to his cronies…"

"Just like he stopped after I told him to stop, he's not the sort who's beyond saving, I'd say… unless he likes to make people beg." The big guy had picked on Amber's shortage of extremities one day when she was coming back from the shower, and she'd talked him down easily, involving the line of "Often, it is more of a pleasure to watch as others try and fail instead of trying to make them fail, which takes effort on your part."

"I'm really glad you forfeited the match." Ruby said quietly, causing everyone to stare at her as she was rarely so quiet. "Or I'd have forfeited my battle with Nutmeg after she did more than a quarter of my gauge in damage. If you two really don't have Auras… then Amber you are an incredible fighter with how you held onto the initiative over Yang for most of that fight. You girls would have deserved the win… but Weiss and Blake would have probably beaten Krom and Talon up very badly to even out the score."

"Yes, victory through force of arms is less mighty than victory by making your opponent willingly concede to you…" Nutmeg had a small smile on as she addressed Ruby. "We have won already, even though Amber has to pay the price for it."

Amber smirked "Perfectly worth it, you wouldn't even see these new scars on my face, they'll just be like little lines and go unnoticed thanks to these big ones that people focus on." There was an awkward silence looking at Amber's face.

"Have you ever considered… surgical repairs?" Weiss asked after a long moment.

"You keep your own scar for a reason, yes?" Amber never let up on the smirk (which distinctly emphasized the two long scars on the right side of her face), letting her eyelids droop a bit now.

"A lesson learnt, I suppose yours are the same?"

Amber nodded once "Yes, they used to remind me of my own mortality every time I look into the mirror, or at least the two scars I had back when I had feet reminded me. I don't need much more of a reminder nowadays than not quite feeling the ground with each step though. Let's talk about something different, shall we?"

"…That was more blunt than my usual topic changes! I should adopt that into my repertoire!" Nora chirped happily.

Amber's face shifted abruptly to a glum expression "I know not what I have unleashed upon the unfortunate world…"

* * *

_Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late October, 597 AD_

In the silence after Jaune's confession and Pyrrha's failed counter-attack, the stairwell door opened in her face and Pyrrha startled as she came face to visor with a young woman with her teeth chattering in pure rage. Jaune looked alarmed.

"Pyrrha…" Amber Stone said softly, letting the door swing shut behind her as she slowly walked toward the two.

"Amber? What are you doing here?"

Amber had been going to the bathroom after class and happened to see Pyrrha dragging Jaune around a corner. She'd followed after them to see if there was anything interesting that was about to go down. After all, there were bets to be won with Team RWBY over when Jaune and Pyrrha would hook up! She'd never expected Jaune to act the way he did… unless he felt himself unworthy of Pyrrha or something.

The taller girl seemed to ignore the redhead as she walked by on a straight line toward Jaune "Thank you for being here, thus making sure I don't pull a Yang and blast him off the roof, then keep pounding on him until he's finished. Jaune, we have a LOT to talk about." She had stalked up to him before standing at full height with her prothetics straightened out, towering more than a head over Jaune. "First of all, allow me to puncture your bubble of masculine arrogance, if you want to stop being the damsel in distress you are going to have to LEARN the skills you will need to stop being a damsel in distress. Do you think being a hero is easy? Cheap? FUN?"

She waved at the redhead standing there watching her rip into the asshole "Do you think Pyrrha got to where she is without blood, toil, sweat and tears?" She took a moment to let out a frustrated snarl before pulling off her helmet "Do you think I got here without paying a price? Look closely, Jaune, look at this face," Her face was twisted into a gnarled expression of pure rage that was made all the more hideous by the five ragged primary scars and countless smaller pale lines that would otherwise not have stood out on her skin tone all ridging up due to reduced flexibility compared to normal skin. "I'm going to die fighting and I know it, because it's not like I'll do well in business with how I'd probably make everyone at a conference puke just by smiling at them, and even being a housewife is never going to happen. I gave up EVERYTHING to come to Beacon to prove that you don't need an Aura to fight the Grimm and prevail, and yet you think that just because your ancestors were warriors that you must be one too?"

She was hyperventilating briefly before shaking her head furiously to clear it a bit, hunching over and taking a few deep, slow breaths, finally hissing quietly "You made this choice, Jaune, now you need to learn from us and survive, or refuse to learn and get yourself killed." She straightened up to full height again, noting for a moment how Pyrrha, who had been mildly shorter than her back when she had feet, was _vastly_ below her eye level with straightened prosthetics. _Strange that I never really took note of that change in relative max height until now._ "Also, Jaune, you were way too loud, if anyone overheard you, they could blackmail you easily for the huge secret you just revealed. I wouldn't be surprised if Ozpin has all of this on security camera right now, and he's not stupid so he knows you're lacking in credentials, but he sees you have potential, so he tolerates you. You shouldn't worry about any staff learning of this since they can already see it, they're not stupid. You should really be worrying about the students finding out, because trust me my reaction to this was a hell of a lot more restrained than most students' reaction would have been given how hard we've worked, fought and bled our whole lives just to get here. You would be able to expect a thorough beating from just about everyone, even though they won't kill you for fear of expulsion and arrest. Then you'll be treated like the lowest ranking member of Beacon for the rest of your days here, Grimm will get more respect than you."

Amber shook her head derisively before continuing "I should be able to convince Team TANK to back you, and Pyrrha and I will talk Team RWBY into understanding, given Ruby and Yang are nice enough to understand, and Weiss and Blake will follow just to save their team-mates even if they'd probably want to see you punished for your lie. You got this chance instead of vastly more qualified people, you owe it to them to not squander it. That means learning and bettering yourself instead of insisting that you don't need help. Get over it, and accept the help we offer, or get the fuck out of our sight. For Pyrrha's sake, I hope you choose to learn from us. Now, I can't really speak for Pyrrha, but you were stomping on your chances just now. You still have a chance to learn, even if it has to be from me, if Pyrrha has changed her mind. Think about it, we're going back to our rooms, talk to Pyrrha first once you finish deciding, you need to apologize. I'll see you some other time."

"I am right here you know." Pyrrha finally interceded, sensing that if Amber spewed anything more it would be a stream of hate instead of the helpful smacking of sense into Jaune that she had been doing.

"Yeah, but he needs to think about his priorities, so I think we should give him a bit of time for that." Amber walked back to the stairwell and started to descend, one clunky step at a time.

"Yes… yes we should." With one last look at Jaune, Pyrrha left him standing on the roof alone with "Choose what you think is best, Jaune". She raised an eyebrow seeing Amber leaning against the wall of the stairwell on the next landing down, between the top floor and the roof.

"You don't need to worry about anything if I teach him, Pyrrha."

Pyrrha chose to fake dumb, even though she knew it probably wouldn't hold against her old acquaintance. "What?"

Amber snorted quietly "You've been crushing on him for months now, it's obvious to everyone except him, and in his case it's probably mostly a self-worth issue that prevents him from acknowledging it. You have nothing to fear from me in terms of competition, assuming you're still even interested in him after that… idiocy we just both had the misfortune to hear. Actually, scratch that, even if you're not interested, I'm thoroughly uninterested. Besides, I'm not going to get into something with a guy only to have him run off on me later on because he found a better-quality girl, as is guaranteed to happen."

"Pessimism doesn't suit you Amber, it never did."

"You are right as usual, I have a cynical mouth, which is worse than being entirely cynical."

"I'm sure you'll find someone who can look past your exterior." _I thought we went over this before, Amber, in smaller scales of course, before you lost your feet and grew distant…_

"One can only be blind to the obvious for so long, Pyrrha, and I will have no self-deluding fools. The result of being picky about the few chances I might have at mating means that biologically I'm a dead end. I'm not from a rich family, I don't have power or influence enough to attract someone of sufficient quality for me to not feel like I'm wasting my time… at the end of the day that means I'm not going to settle for anything I can realistically get and thus probably will end up with nothing. I'm hoping a reputation as a fighter and survivor will help, but I'm more interested in proving to the world that you don't need people with Auras to defeat the Grim and ensure humanity's place in the world."

"We've had this conversation before, Amber, and you had explained to me your noble motive already. Unfortunately the prejudice runs deep even at its shallowest… it will take a lot of work to change things for the better…"

"Exactly, distractions are not an option…" Amber began descending the stairs again "How many people do you think heard Jaune's announcement with the way he was shouting most of it from the rooftops?" _Ungrateful brat who refused a pretty girl's help cause of macho pride…_ Amber thought, but didn't voice since she didn't want to annoy Pyrrha.

Pyrrha frowned, Amber saw in her rear-view display "Knowing Jaune's luck, exactly one guy, by the name of Cardin Winchester, would have heard him."

"Pessimism suits you even worse than it does me, Pyrrha."

"I know." There was a bit of silence between them as they walked, before… "You know, I'm still surprised you put on that much muscle in a year. You used to favour endurance and mobility, but now you're more of a hulking brute than Yang…"

"Endurance is still there, but my mobility is crippled anyhow, might as well increase strike power to compensate…" Amber decided to poke through the thin veneer that separated them from what she knew to be true. It was about time given the number of occasions they'd discussed this "You jelly?"

Pyrrha sighed "You make me feel soft and flabby in comparison."

"Hey, I still kept enough body fat to have periods, you know."

An incredulous look later… "Amber, you've studied way too much biology in your spare time."

* * *

**A/N:** SOOOOO, who thinks Amber's most often-used quote should be "You need to see an optometrist"? (BTW: anyone wondering about her musculature, think Kjelle from "Fire Emblem Sketch Request - round 5" by keiiii on DeviantArt, but with a lot more battle scars, Pyrrha would be like Severa in comparison to Amber's hulking frame.)

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**MEleeSmasher**: I'd appreciate if you could leave longer reviews… and actually critique the content, thanks.

**(Guest) "Weiss"**: depends on how the canon takes things, if no other ships for Ruby/Weiss occur, then Pink it shall be, though expect the two ships for Krom (Frosted Chrome versus Whetstone) to ram into each other even while Amber's wrestling the rudder as far as she can to not intersect with the path of the unknowing Weiss.

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	9. Acknowledgement Is Power

A/N: Part of the inspiration for this chapter came from "Massages", although Amber is not nearly so skilled as Jaune is in that fic, she's still competent enough at battlefield medicine (being Ungifted, she needs to be) to deal with most pains. Although she's pretty bad at mending wounds so that they won't scar… yeah.

**Episode 13** freed me from limitations for the next 2 chapters or so as Team TANK goes through leadership woes. However, it was too clichéd and chances are I'm going to edit events to be less cliché.

* * *

Chapter 7: Acknowledgement Is Power

_Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late October, 597 AD_

Teams RWBY, JNPR and TANK had segregated themselves according to combat roles as they sat around in the student lounge. This meant Krom, Talon, Ren and Blake were lounging about together. Nutmeg, Pyrrha, and Ruby were the general infantry that hung together, and, much to Amber's misfortune, Nora, Weiss and Yang were with Amber as a mix of support troops and alpha damage users, in some cases (Nora and Amber) both. Jaune however, had come in late due to having to finish up an assignment, and felt rather left out since he believed he couldn't exactly participate in the swords group given his lack of skill, wasn't a general infantry soldier, and had neither support capacity nor alpha damage.

"Jaune, haul your ass over here and sit down." Amber commanded him irritably. He tensed slightly but did as he was told "Now, what were you girls saying about rankings?"

"Well, I found out that there seems to be an 'official' ranking emerging for us girls, and another one for boys." Yang said, still perfectly cheerful. Jaune had a sudden thought of what Yang would react like if she learnt of his secret… then decided that the image of the aftermath of Yang's blazing fury directed upon him was too gruesome for his mental health. He'd seen that blood rage at full intensity on one occasion a week and a half ago, two days after Amber's first armour set had been fully replaced, and there had been a LOT of blood involved. In fact, one of the Team Cardinal guys had spent a week in the infirmary and these days would often turn around and walk straight away from Yang whenever he saw her and could leave. As for what had triggered it? The fool had the guts to cut off not one but four strands (well, fragments of four strands) of the blonde's mane. Jaune had learnt to hang around Yang to get away from Team Cardinal for the past few days.

"I'm at the top right? For the alpha damage category at least?" Amber lolled her head to one side lazily "And Weiss is at the top for support abilities?"

"Er, no, I ended up at the top rank, for hotness."

"Well, you sure have enough fire for that, especially if your hair gets pulled." Weiss chipped in, trying to ignore the sudden awkwardness of the topic by faking dumb orally, though she looked pointedly at Amber and flicked her eyes toward Jaune a couple times, asking the muscular girl to shoo the blonde away, as this wasn't exactly a topic where it was easy to not step on toes when discussed in co-ed fashion.

Amber had decided to take the pessimistic line of thought instead of Weiss's hesitant optimism "Guys find blood rages arousing, I suppose…" She noted quietly before speaking a little bit louder "Nora's almost tied with you yeah? I mean, I would think so?" _No duh, curvy like Yang, bubbly—granted for a lot of guys that disturbing level of cheeriness is a turn-off—and of course at the opposite end of the spectrum from where me and maybe Nutmeg are stuck for life._

"Close. Actually Ruby's ranked just below Yang 'cause cuteness'." Nora put in.

"Boys have been lusting after my sister?"

"Better than them shuddering whenever they see her bare back." Amber had been inspecting Broken Ember for scratches, before putting the weapon down at the desk, turning around and yanking the back of her shirt—she'd taken off her armour for the weekend—up as far as she could without basically taking it off. Yang shivered at the sight and Amber, looking over her shoulder as far as she could, smirked. "Exactly, so unless you'd rather your sister look something like this, be happy that she's going to have no problem attracting any guy she decides to desire at a later point in life." Yang sighed with a glum nod. By now the attention of all twelve were on the exchange centered around Amber, Yang and Nora to see how it would play out.

"Wow, you must have been in so many more battles than me… I barely have any small scars, yours are huge!" Nora twittered and Ren, who was sitting with most of the men at the next table over, facepalmed loudly. The bubbly orange-haired girl didn't seem to notice her provisional boyfriend's facepalm though and continued talking with Amber about scars and other disfigurements.

Amber laughed as Nora talked about having to plaster her face with various acne creams during puberty "Really? Well then I suppose this ugly mug was lucky in that one respect, during my pimply years they'd always show up on my ass instead. Of course, the one time I accidentally popped a zit by pinching it too hard, I didn't quite realize what it was, or that fluid had come out, until I looked at my finger under the light. I found it hilarious that I didn't realize I wasn't getting acne on my face until that moment."

"Amber, with how much you seem to talk about your scars, and given you have much larger reminders of your mortality already, I think Weiss was right back when she suggested surgical repair. I think it'll make you happier." Yang cut in.

"Pfft, surgery to fix all these scars would be too expensive for me to afford, and they couldn't fix them completely anyhow. Don't even try to tell me that this gesture doesn't go well with the scars." She brought her left hand up to her face, rested her thumb on the round gouge mark on the left side of her face, and stroked her index and middle fingers along the long scars on the right side in a beard-stroking gesture. Then she noticed that the three members of her team rolling their eyes and were taking the break in chatter to take a drink, then decided to state a blunt fact. "Anyhow, for the amount that getting surgery to make me less repulsive would cost, I could probably manage to buy a night with a decent young Gifted…" There was the sound of explosive oral decompression and the evacuation of liquid and Amber paused for a moment before continuing "…and of course compensate him for turning him gay if he insists on looking anywhere except the front of my torso, which is mostly not scarred." That should have been obvious given taking frontal hits was a BAD IDEA.

…_Okay, that was a bad idea._ "Note to self: Next time I state a blunt fact while someone's drinking and facing me, wear my helmet and visor." Amber said with her eyes squeezed shut. "Also, make absolutely sure it's just water that you're drinking, cause if that had been orange juice or some other caustic substance…" Yeah, some of it had gotten in her eyes, fortunately, it was just water for both of the spitters. "Don't bother getting napkins, guys, it'll dry up quickly enough, sides, not like I'm prone to wearing white shirts unlike a certain someone." Amber, currently wearing a rather water- splattered green shirt and mostly-dry dark blue pants, smirked at Weiss who rolled her eyes but smirked back, given she was indeed wearing a white shirt.

The smirk slid off Weiss's face a moment later "Do you really think you'd have to pay a guy for sex?"

"Will he need a psychiatrist to help him with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder afterward? I would think so, and he'll need some money for the exchange to not be a total loss for him. For me it'll be an upgrade of my biological fitness from zero to zero point five with the first time I do it, hopefully. I'd rather not have to spend money more than twice to break even biologically, but that's another matter entirely."

Weiss kept her mouth shut, knowing there was no defeating Amber in this argument, though she let Ruby break herself upon the immovable will of Amber Stone for the next little while. Finally the group began to disperse with Amber telling the three members of her team they should go do their exercises. She would join them half an hour later, she said. Weiss knew what this meant, it meant Amber was about to complete the assertion of Team TANK's dominance over Team JNPR. She also knew full well from Amber's body language that she was at least grudgingly submitting her team to Team RWBY in the dominance hierarchy by virtue of pure might.

Blake had also maintained silence as she watched the doomed Ungifted girl shrug off Ruby's attempts to elevate her self-confidence. _She may act pragmatic and serious, but inside… she is more innocent than Ruby if she believes they will actually let her get through her years at Beacon without at least crippling her further into irrelevance, particularly as she's too damaged to ever think of being an eye-candy trophy wife. Amber… you probably believe that you're here to make the world better even more than Ruby does, maybe that's why you get along well even though you don't find her serious enough._

* * *

**A/N:** Yes, Amber has fallen into the same trope that all my ham-fisted heroines tend to fall into, except there's less of her to fall and a lot more scars on what's left of her. To fight for what's right and do it intelligently, one needs to be two things: pragmatic in execution of tasks… and hopelessly optimistic in believing that they can change the world for the better.

* * *

_28 minutes later…_

"Amber." The blonde said as the girl walked past him on metallic feet, exiting the student lounge half an hour after the last of her team's other members left.

"Jaune." She stopped and planted a hand against the wall next to him. "You want to talk to me."

"You're as self-conscious as I am, how do you do it and still appear so tough?"

Amber had hoped for this, it would give her the chance to give the boy a lecture he desperately needed "There is strength in acknowledging weakness, overcoming it, making it irrelevant, or both. I've boosted my strength and durability enough to partly balance for my lack of Aura, and my alpha strike power makes my lack of Aura effectively irrelevant other than in terms of reload rate. I know I can never cover up all these reminders of my fragility, but sufficient financial incentive should get someone I'd regard as somewhat acceptable to help me conceive, despite the negative consequences for him. It's not like I'll have much else to spend my bounties on, and I'll be bringing masses of them in with my area of effect weapons." Such was the salary system of Hunters, flat wage plus commissions. "I mean, I feel sorry for the guy who accepts that payment, and it'll have to be pretty big to get someone I would accept to go for it, but that's what I get for having high standards while myself being far, far off from those standards. So, let's bring the conversation back to you, Jaune, and the fact that you need to learn or die ASAP for Pyrrha's sake."

Her mind was singing a different tune. _Sure, Amber, you just keep lying to everyone about that… you know full well that you wouldn't feel comfortable unless it was someone you were genuinely familiar with, and that means they would never accept compensation if they're close enough to be trusted with this sort of thing… and you'd never let yourself scar them for life like that._ Then she decided to look on the "bright" side for once. _Well, at least I don't actually need to wear a brown paper bag over my head all the time yet, so hopefully I won't take too much more damage before it comes time to ask one of the guys I know for a bit of help._ Then her opinion of herself set in again. _Then again that'll probably take long enough to double my years spent in combat, and I would think with more dangerous missions even my higher skill level would net me at best equal rate of scar accumulation. Well, if I survive to our ten-year class reunion I'm going to need to wear a brown paper bag over my head for comic relief… then put my helmet on with the polarized visor down after people start screaming in horror and running away upon lifting it. Still, maybe if I lie to myself long enough, I'll start believing it and feel better about myself and any prospect of a future I might think I have…_

The boy flinched slightly but Amber ignored this as her mouth motored on, leaving the thoughts and doubts in her mind unvoiced as she went from her casual stoop to standing at full height, looming over Jaune and, from an outside point of view, sort of pinning him to the wall. "I've known Pyrrha for a long time, Jaune, and I don't like to see my friend wasting time on or with an obstinate team leader who can't learn to improve himself. I owe her that much. She was the only one who took me seriously back in the day when I joined the Mistral Tournament 'without an active Aura' and battled my way through the rankings to where she waited at the top. I lost to her on a technicality and when we sparred afterward we came out evenly matched, even though I was taking physical damage and she was only taking Aura damage, by the time I was incapacitated" Amber rubbed at the scar through her left eyebrow a bit, telling Jaune just where it came from "she was deep in the red, beyond when a judge would have called the match. Pyrrha's somewhat better than Yang on average but no match for her psychotic episodes." She explained and Jaune's thoughtful look shifted to one of enlightenment "Remember, you'll feel even worse if one of your team members gets injured and you're not there to protect them, and I know you know that. Still, some things have to be said out loud and if certain tender egos must be trodden on to keep my friends safe then I will stomp on them without hesitation. Pyrrha's a good person, to put up with you for so long without beating you into shape. I'm starting to run low on patience though, and if you get my friend hurt… you know who will ram lessons down your throat just as hard as you think about ramming your dick down some chick's throat when you masturbate."

Jaune's jaw fell open wide enough for Amber to test fitting her fist in (gently, of course)… it didn't work, and the boy seemed not to notice until he muttered dazedly, long after she pulled her fist back "Amber?"

"Yes?"

"You use the _weirdest_ analogies."

"I'd have thought you'd be used to it by now."

"I… I accept your offer of help."

"Good… Let's begin."

"Wait, now?"

"Why not? Join me as I push my team-mates through their exercise regimens." She smacked him against the shoulder hard enough for him to stumble for a moment and left "Take your stuff back to your room, meet us there."

_I shouldn't have doubted you, Amber._ Pyrrha Nikos thought as she finished returning to the lounge from the bathroom, having seen the entire exchange. _I'm glad you saw reason, Jaune. From now on, no more jealousy from me toward Amber… Unless it comes back to bite me in the ass, then I should feel free to be suspicious… Shut up, mind, and stop being a smartass._

* * *

"How… the hell… do you… put… up… with this?" Jaune was panting as he worked at one-third less than what Amber was doing in the next chest fly machine with a bored expression.

"A lot of practice, took me four months to get back to my old levels during rehab, and another three to build up to what I usually do these days, when I realized I needed more strength to compensate for then-crippled mobility." She was breathing deeply and steadily as she brought her arms together in front of her, each arm pulling at 37.5 kilos (82.5 pounds) of weights through the machine's lever and pulley system. She opened her arms smoothly enough that there was only a clink when the weights landed on the stack of other weights. Then she brought them together again, not reacting to the crashing noises Jaune's machine was making at a comparable tempo. She sighed mentally _Jaune… your first lesson will hurt, a lot._

"You have wider shoulders than I do." Jaune said after a couple deep breaths after putting his weights down.

"I noticed, it comes from working out too much on strength training even back when I went for a hit-and-run fighting style, I probably had to give myself combat drugs at least once every two months back then during critical mission junctions so that I could keep up. It was mostly adrenaline, but I suspect there were androgens in the mix from the adult-sized Epi-Pens I used for the purpose back when I was a scrawny kid. An unfortunate consequence of my pectorals is that my tits go further than they should, which gets in the way a bit in mobility and close quarters battle. Fortunately, they're fare less hindering than Yang's clubs." The boy winced, a natural reaction given one occasion where Jaune hadn't watched where he was moving and Yang had whirled around at the wrong time, resulting in the boy knocking himself out by falling backward into a column. Then he realized something, as his face going blank told Amber. "Out with it." She snapped as she let her weights down again slowly.

Jaune was starting to get used to the extremely candid way Amber talked about all sorts of things "You don't look much larger than Ruby, though you definitely seem better endowed, it's not by that much…"

"I know, I have smaller boobs than the youngest girl in Beacon, but at least my muscles make them seem more than Weiss has, even though we should be similar. Stop delaying the end of your unauthorized break, come on, finish your hundred reps for today, you'll have to do two hundred like me eventually and then we'll be cranking up the weight, better get used to it."

"I got used to her way of talking within a week, you'll get used to her diabolical training schemes quickly enough, Jaune." Krom said, finishing up one set of exercises and wiping the sweat from his brow.

"Iron must be dirtied, burnt, and beaten—" Amber recited at him.

"—before it can become steel." Krom finished for her with a small smirk before he took a swig from his water bottle and moved on to the next machine "I know, Amber, you've told us enough times."

Nutmeg spoke next as she pushed weights with her legs in the seated leg press attached to the same machine. "Amber's got broader shoulders and standing at full height with those legs is somewhat taller than Cardin, though her head's a bit bigger than his too so it's to scale there and less obvious than it could be, Jaune, I'd have thought it obvious enough." Even though Amber preferred holding herself at Krom and Talon's height (Nutmeg was slightly shorter) she could be huge and scary when she wanted to be.

Jaune muttered something unintelligible in response.

After several more sets of various strength-building exercises, Amber declared a short water break. "Break? There's more?"

"Of course, we've only been in here for an hour and a half, we got another hour of cardio to do before we're done for the day! It's the weekend, hence the 90 minutes strength building instead of 60. Onto the treadmills everybody!"

"Why did they get to do much lighter weights than you?"

"For these 90-minute sessions, they're doing endurance more than strength, because it's just too damned long to do unless you've been conditioned for years, even pushing myself as hard as I possibly could I had to take most of a year to build myself from being freshly rehabilitated to being combat-capable like I am now. I'll have to stay here for a while after they're done because I waited to rope you into this."

* * *

_47 minutes later…_

There was a muffled thumping at Team JNPR's door and a few loud kicks. Pyrrha pulled it open and saw Amber looking glum… then she looked down to find a trembling heap of Jaune Arc whimpering piteously as he was being hauled back to the JNPR dorm by bridal carry.

"Pyrrha… save me… from this monster."

Amber rolled her eyes as she passed the boy to the smaller, far less imposing girl "I gave him salt water with other electrolytes added throughout the session, he'll live, he learned a valuable first lesson of training today. Always know when to just refuse to continue, to know when it stops being good for you. I didn't let him work himself into total exhaustion or hurt yourself, though you might disagree with me tomorrow, and the next day. Will you help him shower, Pyrrha, or should I? I'd have to do another forty-five minutes at least on the treadmills to make up for this sudden break fifteen minutes from the end of my regimen. I saw he couldn't take anymore so I called him off to help him back. His legs gave out halfway back even with an arm around my shoulder, so this was more efficient than dragging him along. I still have half an hour's strength training to make up for because I left the lounge later than my team-mates."

Pyrrha sighed but couldn't facepalm because her arms were full "I'll deal with him, he's my team leader after all."

"Please… get me away from her… I don't want to die…" Jaune croaked, scrabbling feebly at the front of Pyrrha's shirt. He let out a small shriek of horror as his wrist was snatched by Amber a moment before it would accidentally have landed on Pyrrha's right breast.

"I have a feeling I still might have overdone it a bit because he didn't complain about my instructions. Next time, Jaune, remember, reality trumps willpower more often than we'd like, that's your main lesson for the day. I'll pick you up two days from now and give you a more reasonable regimen." There was a small whimper as she stepped away slowly.

"I… I'm free… I'M FREE!" Jaune croaked after Amber left and Pyrrha deposited him on the floor wondering what to do with him "I managed to convince her to carry me here… hurrah…"

"Jaune, can you bathe yourself or do you need me to help you?"

"Let me try to sit—AH!" He gasped a bit at the pain in his sore abs "Sorry, Pyrrha, can you get Ren instead?" He waved his hand at the door vaguely before dropping his arm with another wince.

Pyrrha rolled her eyes "Jaune, I've dealt with enough guys to know full well what you look like, I can just hold you up under the shower head if you're not comfortable, sides we're going to get soaked on plenty of missions anyhow and in the field there won't be any time for modesty when we need to get out of wet clothes. I promise I won't look, well, not on purpose anyhow."

"That's not comforting."

"Let's get you that shower… and not speak of this, ever again." _I knew I should have lassoed Amber into giving him said shower!_ I didn't expect him to quite have reached this level of exhaustion… _Then again, with how enthusiastically she goes about things relating to combat she'd probably give Jaune a fear of showers. That girl's almost Nora-level insane when she gets into things… almost being the key word._ "Now, where do you store your underwear?" _I have a bad feeling Amber's been influencing me into being about as blunt as a rivet._

* * *

**A/N:** No, this is not a Gratuitous Fan-Service Shower Scene.

* * *

_Fifteen minutes later…_

SMACK!

"AHHH! Amber! Stones! Amber Stone smashing me with stones!" There was a snort of laughter from outside the stall before it was quickly stifled and Pyrrha rolled her eyes.

"Please stay awake while I hang onto you to keep you from falling under this shower spray? I don't know what sort of hell Amber put you through in the exercise room that's made you unable to even stand and almost exhausted your Aura, but one of the important parts of dealing with women is to not yell out another woman's name when one is busy cleaning you up from being mauled." Pyrrha was painfully aware of the fact that all the (admittedly not many) men in the room had upon her entry into the men's bathroom, carrying Jaune in just his boxers, while she was wearing her swimwear, probably piled up outside the shower stall's door to listen to what was happening as she manhandled him into the stall and stood him, half-conscious, under the shower spray. First she'd gone about washing his sides under his arms, and she had to convince him (read: grab his arms and force him with yelps of pain) to hold onto the curtain cross-bar with both hands, moaning in discomfort, as she scrubbed away at his armpits and sides. Fortunately, the tensing of his grip from being ticklish prevented him from falling down…

Then came washing his front and back, with one of her arms holding him across the chest to her so that her other hand could be free. It was during the latter experience that Jaune had managed to fall asleep from not having the water on his face for a few minutes and Pyrrha had to smack him awake. He seemed to have regained a bit of strength though and helped towel himself off before asking her to stand in the actual shower part of the stall with the curtains pulled as he changed his boxers. There was much thudding against the wall and groaning before Pyrrha decided to shove the curtain aside, ignore Jaune's squeal of shock from where he was resting his back for a moment with the crown of his head against the wall, and help him pull his boxers up, not looking thanks to her eye-roll. "Pyrrha! What are you…"

"Getting us out of here quicker, come on, put an arm over my shoulders, I think you can hobble now without falling, at least until our dorm room, so I don't have to carry you this time." They padded out of the stall in their slippers (of the non-furry variety) and Pyrrha looked around at the boys in the motion of dispersing "If any of you want to suffer the phenomenon known as Amber Stone's idea of exercise, please stop staring at me and contact her instead." There was a collective shudder as the males who had been present or heard about it recalled the plight of two other unfortunate comrades who had, in the first few days of class, limped in every day barely able to stand, leaning on each other for support as they entered the bathroom swaying like drunks, babbling about demon women and the true, hideous face of evil. Unfortunately for Amber, the use of the term "hideous" was more telling to half the guys then present as to who this woman was that they were cursing than the fact that these guys were under her leadership.

Jaune didn't think too much of it as he just wanted to collapse into bed and sleep, and tried to do this until Pyrrha held him back, pulled the blanket/comforter/duvet/thing aside, then let him fall on it. She rolled her eyes, rolled him over onto his back, already mostly asleep, and pulled the blanket over him leaving his arms and feet out, given it wasn't that cold "Nice boxers by the way." She teased as she went off to do her homework, chuckling to herself at the poke.

The sad result was that Jaune stared up at the ceiling for a whole minute more, choosing not to torture his neck and back muscles by turning over to look at her incredulously like he wanted to, before finally deciding that rest was more important than what may or may not have been a fatigue-induced hallucination and drifted off to sleep. This did not prevent the expression on his face from being one of "What the fuck just happened?"

* * *

**A/N:** I just call the thing with a cloth outer jacket that most people use as a practical bed cover (screw all the complicated sheets and layers on top of the bed!) a blanket. I thought the last sentence concerning Amber just now, regarding the identification traits, was really weirdly structured… but whatever.

* * *

_The next morning…_

Jaune flinched as Amber walked into the dining hall. His eyes never left the thing his mind had labelled _DEATH OF HOPE_ as she rolled her freakishly broad shoulders while standing in line. He twitched slightly as she and her team sat next to his team. "How are you feeling, Jaune?"

"My fork clatters against the plate as I try to use it because the muscles are so sore, how do you think?" He deadpanned.

"I have some massage oils that should help, Pyrrha can help apply them if she's not too busy with her own work, or I can do it." The unspoken message of her glance at Nora (Jaune's mind had subconsciously labelled the hyperactive girl _DESTROYER OF WORLDS_) was clear, if Pyrrha was busy and Jaune didn't accept Amber… he was doomed. He did not want Nora's hands anywhere near him, she might have been joking about using Magnhild to pound out some of the discomfort, but Jaune had a feeling that even though she probably wouldn't, her hands hammering at him would be more than dangerous enough for his continued well-being.

"You do it, Amber, I think you should take some time to apologize to Jaune for what you put him through when you knew he wasn't ready." Pyrrha grumbled.

* * *

_Later that morning…_

Pyrrha winced mentally as the moans of discomfort drifted through the half-shut door of Team JNPR's room and through the open door of Team RWBY's room, with the occasional yelp of pain. The lecture, however, was worth listening to. "Acknowledging one's own weaknesses also includes recognizing one's limits. There's a reason I cut down on the weights for you later in there. I noticed you wouldn't recognize your own limits. Granted, I noticed it a bit late and Nutmeg seemed to have realized earlier now that I think about it, only holding back from saying anything because she figured I'd realize before you hit full exhaustion. Fortunately I did, or she'd have poked a hole in my bubble of overzealousness before I drove you into the ground, tactfully, of course, but still. Have you learned your lesson with respect to knowing your limits and refusing to go beyond them?"

"Yes… that… that feels so much better." Jaune groaned.

"Good." There was a long silence from Amber "What should we talk about next?"

"Augh… wait, What?" Pyrrha could imagine Jaune's eyes snapping open at that comical question.

Amber chuckled "Just joking…"

"Pfft… " Jaune was probably rolling his eyes as he huffed, Pyrrha thought "Why didn't we do this in Team RWBY's room where everyone else is hanging out again?"

"One of the sets of beds is a death trap, the other is a defilement of reason itself by crushing books like that, not to mention they could slip so it's a Death Trap Mark Two, complete with more stealth so that you don't even see your impending doom coming until Yang wakes up one night to Blake blasting her way through the fallen bed with her Aura and giving Yang an Aura-cushioned interview with the ceiling. I don't have an Aura so I can't survive such a drop on my head when I'm not wearing armour, it would probably break my neck if I'm unprepared."

Meanwhile in the other room… "You know what I just realized?" Nora had just taken a drink from her water canteen, then stared at it for a moment. This drew the attention of the people in the RWBY Team Room to her instead of the other orange-ish haired girl. "When we collect our part of the bounty for a mission that we get through the school, Amber can go out and buy alcohol for us. Then we can steal it from her, it's not giving alcohol to minors if it's stolen, right? More so if she's too lax to prosecute us for the theft?"

"Nora, how about no?" Ren was grinning as he shook his head at his friend's antics. Alcohol plus Nora generally meant either total annihilation of the surroundings or her falling asleep and him having to haul her back to their rooms… or both, in whatever order.

While Beacon had a close shave with unimaginable amounts of pain, Amber was wrapping up squeezing her oil into Jaune's limp body. "I wish Pyrrha was doing this, she'd enjoy it a lot more and probably have warmer things to say. You feeling better, Jaune?"

"Yeah, doesn't hurt as much anymore." Jaune tried to not think of the consequences of Amber's words.

"Good, I'm no professional at battlefield medicine, or I'd have smaller scars. The only one of these that couldn't have gone better is the one Pyrrha gave me, her weapon was hot at the time so it cauterized most of the injury immediately, so there was only so much mitigation that could be done. Fortunately my burnt-off eyebrow grew back soon enough though. Mind you, this was back in the day when I used just Broken Ember and a rectangular shield and depended a lot on gimmicks and tricks to survive." Said shield, similar to a smaller riot shield, had been divided in half diagonally and after some modification incorporated into the wings of her thruster pods, forming the upper, curved faces. Amber had been very glad she'd used a good helmet design from all the hard landings she'd had to endure while learning to use her wings in gliding landings. It had served her well even back in the day before she decided to armour herself and bulk up further, especially as tracking her by Aura was impossible—she didn't have one.

"Alright, let's rejoin the others, see what they've been talking about."

* * *

Unfortunately for Amber, Pyrrha had been blowing her horn and talking about how good a fighter she was despite her lack of an Aura. The result was that Talon had realized something he'd forgotten quite some time ago given how well Amber and Nutmeg had handled themselves in spars and the like. It probably had to do with how he and Krom were used to being the best and beating most competitors flat out, but they had accepted the usually reasonably close defeats the girls suffered at their hands when they used their Auras. "Right, Amber, Nutmeg, we need to get your Aura unlocked as soon as possible…"

Amber gulped as she turned slowly to face him "…Alright…" This could mean a lot of trouble for her authority if the men subscribed to the propaganda that the Ungifted had no souls…

* * *

**A/N:** Review Replies!

**MEleeSmasher**: It's good to see wholesome feedback. I will probably insert that smack-down for Cardin at some point. You'd be surprised at what sort of character Cardin is to me. Here, he's not totally a one-dimensional bully, for example he recognized Amber's words in their first encounter as wisdom and left her alone after that (also, someone as physically imposing as you, except a bit taller and with better armour, is not generally someone bullies go after much). Agreed that Jaune and Amber are similar enough, both have severe self-esteem problems for example, but I think Jaune would probably die if Amber took over his physical training and pressed him as hard as she'd pressed herself during rehab, as shown above. As for Yang, you'll see.

**REVIEW!** Stay Tuned for **Chapter 8: Magazine Explosion** and **Chapter 9: Catastrophic Kill**! (Chapter titles subject to change)


	10. Magazine Explosions

**A/N:** If you look at Amber and Weiss, they are essentially on opposite ends of the spectrum (and alphabet), huge, clunky, armoured, alpha-damage slugger versus small, nimble, unburdened, damage-over-time spell-caster. I feel bad stacking the odds so firmly against Amber in terms of reproductive chances, especially as they will be stacked even further after Chapter 9 as she adds more to her tally of obvious disfigurements. Then again survivor genes may be desirable to some… hmm… Well, this chapter will contain a lot of fighting.

I will have to heavily modify Episode 14 to move it out of the realm of the ridiculously cheesy ("The greatest lesson of being a leader, Jaune, Cardin, is to coordinate all available allies and employ their skills to the maximum, instead of insisting on taking every combat task upon yourself."). Oh Monty what have you done, now I have to do damage control…

* * *

Chapter 8: Magazine Explosions

_Beacon Academy, Vale Continent, late October, 597 AD_

Predictably, things didn't go very well, almost as badly as the blackmail Jaune was probably under with how late he returned to the dorms at night, according to Pyrrha. That however did help explain why he went down before Amber expected, she'd planned to tire him badly during training but not drain him completely. But that wasn't the point.

Yes, team TANK got back to their room without any issues, but Talon and Krom wanted to get Amber's Aura up and running that night and deal with Nutmeg the next day. Amber could only feel a deep sense of dread as she sat cross-legged in front of Talon, who was also sitting cross-legged, with her back to him. _And I don't even have my armour… I hope he doesn't overreact too badly, because it'll be hard to explain the big smear of blood and shredded flesh if he gives me a full blast of raw weaponized mind power at point blank._ He put his hands on her back over her shoulder blades _Hmm, this is going to stink up the room if he blasts me, would have been better if it had just been on my head, you'd only have to clean up brains, meat, blood, and bone splinters instead of gut contents too. Half digested food smells horrible… any hunter knows that._ She joked to herself morbidly as he did absolutely nothing that she could feel for about twenty seconds before she spoke up.

"Are you sure you're able to identify Auras? Cause I'm not feeling anything." She commented after a while of sitting there, looking back over her shoulder at Talon.

Talon was finished doing warm-ups on his own Aura and frowned, though admittedly he didn't sense even a spark from her which was odd… "The textbook description would be that Aura is the manifestation of our soul, it bears our burdens and shields our hearts. With practice, our Aura can be our shield, everyone has it, even animals."

_Oh the delusions the Gifted feed themselves!_ Amber laughed bitterly in her mind "What about monsters?"

"The monsters we fight lack souls, they are creatures of Grimm, the manifestations of anonymity, they are the darkness, and we are the light." He recited from the texts.

"How about a better reason, because darkness cannot fight back against light, given shinign light into darkness absolves it to some degree or another? They're threats to us and therefore we eradicate them to preserve our own safety." Amber said dryly.

"Well, she's right in a practical sense." Krom said from where he was watching the proceedings.

"According to the texts, it's more about knowing and understanding darkness and light that helps us manifest our Aura, everyone has some of both. By baring your soul outward as a force you can deflect harm. Almost all our tools and equipment are conduits for Aura, projecting yourself and your soul with fire."

"Or we can invent force field emitters that do the same thing to a greater magnitude without straining ourselves." Amber of course had no clue how similar this conversation was to one that had been had in the Emerald Forest during Initiation. "I'd rather not throw my soul away from myself in case I can't recover it."

"Your outlook on life is as interesting as ever." Talon noted with a smile "close your eyes and concentrate."

_Well it would be nice if that could work._ Amber thought as Talon began the ritualized chant, trying to search for her Aura signature and focusing his own to do it "For it is in passing that we achieve immortality, through this we become a paragon of virtue and glory to rise above all… infinite in distance and unbound by death… I release your soul, and by my shoulder, protect thee." Talon frowned, since there was supposed to be a major energy expenditure involved, and he wasn't feeling anything.

"That sounds like something you'd use to commemorate a martyr, Talon, and I don't feel a thing. It's time to tell you, I suppose, about the biggest secret of Vytal."

"I'm guessing it's that rumour that some people have no Auras?" Talon scooted back from her when Krom voiced what the boys were now suspecting.

"Those with the Gift of Dust, what you call Aura, are in fact a small minority, most people don't have any Auras, and what you might feel from them, or from animals, is just environmental Dust that has been incorporated into their bodies over time. From my choices of protective clothing and where I prefer to go, I haven't encountered much ambient Dust so not much has been incorporated yet. You wouldn't feel a thing from me. People who don't have the Gift will die if exposed to excess amounts of Dust, more so if the Dust is in Activated form."

Krom looked shocked, as if his entire worldview had been turned upside-down "You can't be serious? That's the most preposterous thing I've ever heard."

"More preposterous than a girl making her way into the best combat school in the world, sans feet and Gift? Raw determination and relentless training makes up for a lot, but technology is the most key aspect of my success… Most fighters rely on their mental powers, I rely on the mechanical, is that so wrong?"

"It is when you may well be a soulless Grimm infiltrator of some sort." Talon snapped.

Amber snorted as she pushed herself up enough to get her prosthetic legs under her. Both men tensed their hands on their sword hilts but she ignored it "If you really believe that, there's nothing I can do, because trying to convince you to see the truth would make me look guilty, and not trying would be a silent confession. Do what you will, I'm going to do my homework and then go to sleep, lots to do tomorrow. Of course, in case I don't wake up, thanks for making it quick and painless instead of drawn-out, bleeding out in a field somewhere while some creature that bested me feasts on my organs or mangled in some wreckage where I die before someone can cut through and pull me out. And of course, you could choose to see this apparent nonchalance as a bluff if you so choose. If you're convinced that you need to take me down, I have every confidence in both your abilities."

The two males stared after her for a moment as she sat down at her bed, her legs tucked under the desk "I'm guessing you're the same as her, Nutmeg?" Talon turned his head as Amber pulled her homework out from her bag and got started.

"Yeah, I'm also Ungifted, not like you two." Nutmeg was watching as Krom stepped closer to Amber.

"You seem awfully crass about the end of your life." Krom said, sitting across from her on Nutmeg's bed.

Amber grimaced, looking up at him from her textbook "An Ungifted trying to become a huntress means I signed my death certificate the moment I decided to go down this path, all that's left is to put a date and cause of death on it, but someone had to prove to the world that we didn't need to rely on the small Gifted population to save us from the Grimm. Someone had to prove that humanity can and will overcome the threat without the need for some super-elite group. I intend to be that someone."

"Hmm…" Krom hummed acknowledgment, still not completely sure about how he should see this enormous revelation that had just been dumped on him. He looked at Amber closely, probably closer than he had looked at her before, and he realized that while most of the times he'd seen her before he'd only noticed her eyes wide in attention or tightened in determination. There was currently a deep emptiness in her orange eyes, as if she was somewhere else, in another time or place. "What do you see?" He asked suddenly, knowing full well that even if she or it was some sort of infiltrator he wouldn't catch it by surprise.

"I see the future, humanity's future, in these books, there is knowledge, and knowledge gives the power that can bring change… but thank you for caring enough to scrutinize me this closely." She smirked at him and her eyes stopped being as vacant. "I should do my homework before I do any dreaming… actually I should do a hell of a lot more with my life before I dream, for it is in that endless sleep of death that dreams come…"

Krom nodded once "Nice reference."

"Thank you." There were no more words exchanged at that, a few minutes later, Krom moved aside to make room for Nutmeg, who Talon had just tried and failed to unlock, to take her seat on her bed. Both men looked at each other before turning their desks around so that they wouldn't be sitting with their backs toward the female side of the room.

When bedtime came, the two males silently decided who would take which watch, and when Nutmeg noticed Talon taking watch when she was trying to fall asleep, after Amber was already snoozing away, she said "I would offer for us to move somewhere else like the roof, but I would think you'd want us where you can keep an eye on us. Yes, Ozpin and Goodwitch know about us, and they're fine with it given how much we've proven ourselves. Given that this can be interpreted as me trying to fool you into a false sense of security, as can anything else I might say, I should learn more from Amber and stop sticking my foot in my mouth." She lowered herself back down from where her elbows had propped her up and resumed her usual way of falling asleep: shutting her eyes and blanking her mind.

_I have a very bad feeling about how my mental health is going to be once I finish putting up with those two for the next three years and eight months. Psychiatrist… here I come…_ Talon thought to himself glumly as he leaned up against his headboard and settled into a very light doze, waking slightly at every time someone in the room rolled over.

* * *

_The next day… Women's Change Room, Sparring Chambers, Beacon Academy_

"You know, Jaune could have taken care of himself yesterday, but he didn't seem to mind me making sure he didn't slip and knock himself out in the shower or something. Thanks for trying, Amber, but don't be so intent on playing matchmaker next time alright? I'm glad you managed to get him to start dealing with his weakness, but give us some time…" Pyrrha had ambushed Amber, sort of, to tell her to lay off a bit. Since her prior behaviours said she supported Pyrrha and Jaune as a couple, Pyrrha worried that Amber would get a bit overenthusiastic in "helping". In other words Pyrrha was worried that Amber, since she felt there was no hope for herself, would turn out to be a rabid "shipper" toward her friends.

"I know, usually I set the speed on the treadmill a bit lower." _i.e. not half a marathon in one hour_ Amber thought, adding grimly but almost as an afterthought "They've found out."

Pyrrha frowned "Who found out what?"

Amber gestured at herself and her team-mate "Me and Nutmeg, why do you think the guys didn't even talk to us today?"

Pyrrha's eyebrows shot up, she'd been half-hearted when believing what Amber told her in the past, though it would explain the lack of emissions. "Oh… you really actually lack an Aura?"

"Yes, Talon tried to find it in both of us and came up with nothing." Nutmeg said from where she was struggling with her armour's buckles. "Almost starting to think Amber's system of automated latches is simpler to deal with… even if it is heavier." She grumbled to herself

"I thought I told you before." Amber had focused on Pyrrha's tone more than her words.

"Well… I didn't completely believe it, until now, but it make sense."

Amber sighed in irritation "Not you too… the men don't really believe us, fortunately they were smart enough to not kill us in our sleep, cause that would have been tough to explain to the administration. Of course, I would have probably at least blown up the room with us all inside if it had come down to it, I didn't solo a Deathstalker for nothing."

Pyrrha raised her eyebrows _Impressive, then again with her extreme reliance on alpha strike damage and anti-armour capability I shouldn't be too surprised._ "That's a new story, mind telling me about it?."

"Right… you see this?" Amber held up both palms for Pyrrha to get a good look.

"Your left hand's whole palm is paler than it should be, yes, I've noted that before."

The orange-blonde chuckled "It's what happens when I manually set off one of Broken Ember's rockets while holding it. Yeah, rolling under a giant armoured scorpion's leap, jamming it in its mouth and then pushing the manual detonation button near the tail of the rocket probably wasn't my brightest idea, but I didn't have time to reload from my first miss and using anything short of a rocket was a non-option against that armour."

"Amber, you do the most ridiculous things sometimes. How did that not blow your hand off? Didn't you tell me before that you used to carry satchel charges for demolitions?" Pyrrha knew well Amber's propensity for making things blow up with a lot of splash damage.

"The mouth of the creature took most of the blast, the gauntlets I used to wear took most of the carapace shrapnel, and since the rear end of the rocket is open if that little powder charge is blown off, it didn't recoil on my hand too hard when the rocket fuel started burning at the other end to compensate a little as per the settings, though my glove still got shredded off me. Of course I let go as soon as I pushed the button but it still burnt my hand quite a bit as the rocket fuel kept burning after the warhead went off, shoving the remains of the weapon into the remains of the critter's head. I managed to get its brain on that hit with the initial warhead blast, boring through the roof of its mouth, so I destroyed the rest at my leisure as it stumbled about aimlessly. As for satchel charges, well, back then I only bothered with an SMG for a sidearm and didn't use satchel charges because I figured I'd detect something that large coming from far enough away to snipe with my rocket before it noticed me. I started carrying satchel charges after that incident."

"You've been selling yourself short more than usual recently." Pyrrha noted after a hum of acknowledgement. "Did something change?" Nutmeg looked on curiously and Pyrrha wondered briefly why those two team-mates weren't closer than she was with Amber.

"I have people looking up to me now, more so now that I'm mentoring Jaune in the art of combat. I need to keep myself grounded, the best way to do that is to acknowledge my frailty, to know how despondently weak I am, and in understanding find the strength I must have to overcome these obstacles of my life."

"You should go into oration sometime, you seem to really like grand verbal gestures." Pyrrha noted with a smile.

The orange-blonde shrugged "What can I say? They're fun to say, keeps me out of depression, and improve my image in the eyes of others while still keeping my head clear enough to not get arrogant."

Nutmeg snorted before Pyrrha could say anything "Amber, the only thing I've heard from you that's remotely close to even stating your own strengths is your acknowledgement of your own alpha strike power, and that's just a statement of fact. Arrogance and you are not things that fit in the same sentence, on the other hand, smaller-scale optimism isn't either, and that's just sad for a team leader."

"Thank you for the criticism, it will be considered, though I don't think I could pull off a Nora-level optimist with this mug." The real orange-haired girl had been finished in the change room before they had come in and was probably bouncing off the walls of the sparring chambers waiting for them. "Those extremely wide smiles Nora likes would probably inflict mental harm on small children if I tried them." She did the wide, toothy grin that the hyperactive young woman they all knew liked to do, and the scar on her left cheek, along with the two long dashes on the right side of her face wrinkled up, causing Pyrrha and Nutmeg to grimace in acknowledgement that she was right. "Then again, optimism doesn't need you to smile. Believing that I can change the world is more than optimistic enough for me, and yes, I know you said small scale, Nutmeg, I'll have to work on that one. Thanks for bringing it up." She had long since finished donning her usual clothes and turned to leave.

A moment later she poked her head back in "Nutmeg, our men are still in their change room, probably talking. I have a feeling something bad is going to happen."

"Natural that they should talk away from us and somewhere where they can be relatively sure of privacy, but if they decide we aren't trustworthy enough anymore this could go very badly. I'm not about to screen them during our future operations if they don't screen us during our reloads."

"And I think I just understood why I got the leadership position instead of you. You're too cold and calculating. Let's get to the fight." Pyrrha and Nutmeg both nodded as they walked out of the change room. The Team JNPR member soon left to stand around with her own team. "Alright guys, I was thinking that today we could have a close-quarters fight with our natural enemies, those whose fighting styles would probably trash our own thoroughly. There are twelve of us, so six will need to be the first round victims and the other six the second round victims. Aura may be used defensively but not at max power offensively, except in dulling weapons before striking flesh, to avoid any real injury. The matches will end when either party has had enough. For example, I would be thoroughly trounced by Weiss or Nora in close combat," Rapiers and Hammers were tactical anti-armour weapons "but I could shrug off Ruby long enough to counter, and I'd probably be able to overcome Ren or Blake if they weren't allowed to use Aura to enhance or guide their blows," _Ren just doesn't have enough reach and Blake, though she is fast as fuck, has straight blades, which means a twist of the joint or s good twitch will either misalign the blade and the joint or bounce the tip off a plate of nearby armour, the penetration rate should be low enough for me to wear them down through repeated splash alpha delivery._ "because bladed weapons without use of Aura are not very effective against armour unless it's a rapier. We need this sort of training in case we have to operate in some manner of Aura-suppressed environment in the future.

"In other words you want to be on a more even footing with us Aura users." Blake noted flatly. "Though I wouldn't call this even footing." She tapped one of Ambers shoulder plates with a small smirk. "If we can't use Aura offensively, you can't wear your armour, because you know an infused punch would neutralize your armour and a second strike on the same spot or area will break through."

Amber sighed "You do realize that without armour I can be one-shot by anyone here, or at best two-shot? I'd have to sit out if I can't wear my armour because I'd be useless as a training partner."

Nutmeg backed her up "Good that you're not knuckling under, Amber. Good try, Blake, but our leader has enough self-assurance to not be moved easily. I'm a mid-range generalist, I should be vulnerable to close range and long range specialists…"

Once the matches had been hammered out, Amber was facing Weiss and Nutmeg was across from Blake. Krom would be duelling Pyrrha and Talon was put against Nora. Yang would be fighting Ren ("Face it, Yang, he's faster than you are, especially without Aura boosts") and Ruby would be annihilated by Jaune.

"I guess it's just me and you then…" The red and black themed girl said to the older boy.

"Ruby, remember you can't use your Aura to swing your weapon."

"Oh… OH!" I'm glad I made a few accommodations in case my Aura was exhausted and I still needed to use Crescent Rose, but… Jaune is going to wreck me with his speed edge if he gets within reach of me.

"I suppose I'm about to get slashed to ribbons." Nutmeg said as she adjusted her grip on her rifle and SMG to better suit brawling than accurate shoulder-firing. "But while my blades are less flexible, I won't…" she stopped as Blake made her first strike, a boom-and-zoom series of slashes that Nutmeg absorbed on the now greatly reinforced frame of her rifle and the bayonet of her SMG.

"No monologues please." Blake smiled a bit.

Nutmeg nodded with a grimace "But that takes the fun out of it."

"Perhaps." Blake moved again, and Nutmeg barely parried the crossing slashes with her rifle frame. She'd reconstructed the weapon to be more melee-friendly, now not unlike how Amber's crutches in that she had enough open space behind the trigger handle to wield it with one hand with the gun on the outside of said arm instead of inside the arm (inside as in with her elbow sticking out further than the weapon, which was not good for melee uses such as parrying or blocking).

"You're not using your full speed Blake, you should be leaving after-images, you're fast enough that I should be a pile of chunks on the ground before I even realized you'd moved." Nutmeg said, giving up ground as Blake wore her down. She saw a motion that seemed to come from her right and the tactician turned slightly to angle her shoulder pauldron so that any blow glancing off it should bounce off her helmet's smooth lines and not be shot-trapped into the neck joint. That was when Blake struck for the first time in earnest, smashing through the left side of Nutmeg's thin (relative to Amber's slabs) chestplate where it joined with the rest of her torso plate. This locking of Gambol Shroud into place gave Nutmeg an excellent opening with her twist that would have helped deflect an attack to either her forward-left or right-front sides. She jammed down the secondary trigger of her assault rifle, hooked up to the underslung grenade launcher that was currently loaded with a training round.

As far as Blake was concerned, though she'd momentarily flickered in her Aura-based dulling of her weapon, this hit was roughly comparable to being punched in the stomach by Yang. However, it was good that she'd managed to force Nutmeg's hand so soon with the smaller woman's best up-close alpha attack. She let the backward momentum of the blast yank Gambol Shroud free, pleased to see that Nutmeg's defensive manoeuvres had prevented any blunt damage from being sustained from the now dulled Aura-sheathed weapon. At least, it was nothing Nutmeg seemed to feel from her movements and there was no blood.

"Nice trick, you won't get me twice with it." Blake rolled her eyes in false derision as she observed Nutmeg tap a couple buttons on her weapon "Let's keep going before I have to reload this damned thing, shall we?"

"Your move."

"Nah, you go ahead." Nutmeg actually _sat down_ on the floor of the chamber, making Blake stare in surprise before surmising this was a glaringly obvious trap, so obvious that Nutmeg would expect her to not see it… well, circular logic would get them nowhere.

Nutmeg in the meantime was contemplating the question of how to defeat someone heavier, stronger, faster, and vastly more resistant to damage than she was. She popped open the chamber assembly of her grenade launcher and slapped in a new round, even though she could have used the alternate loading mechanism to draw on the second round she'd managed to include in the cycling mechanism of the weapon. It revolved around the main chamber when swinging out to load, but when the weapon was cycled by the loading bolt it revolved around a point in the middle of the two chambers. This made loading both at once impossible, but the loading process itself was very simple and quick, and hopefully could be deceptive enough to be decisive in its surprise in combat.

She was also keeping an eye on Blake's pacing around on her forward arc, until she kept walking but her far-UV image overlay in one of Nutmegs visor PIP windows doubled back. _She has all the visible and commonly used scan wavelengths covered in her illusion making… this woman is GOOD, but my technology is better._ Nutmeg obliged by swinging her launcher's concealed revolving clip shut and shifting slightly to keep the illusion within a 60 degrees forward arc. _Even the passive sonar overlay says she's in front of me… such are the measures she has learnt to deceive the Grimm and most sensors… very well, let us see who the master of deception is, the ninja or the tactician…_

Nutmeg watched the fake Blake (_Hey, that rhymes! … Shut up stupid brain._) move around toward her right for two hundred degrees before she made a move. She predicted that Blake would not strike until she herself manoeuvred, and so she side-stepped slightly before letting the fake hit her with its weapon… _Ouch that hurt more than I expected, not good enough to be the real thing but as a distraction it can do quite a bit of damage._ Nutmeg doubled over slightly as the real Blake moved in for a decisive blow and found herself taking a smoke grenade to the face as Nutmeg seemingly tumbled to one side and fell/rolled onto her back from the impact of the illusion's weapon. The smaller girl didn't have the grenade launcher set to manual operation this time so it cycled the two-round revolving chamber automatically as she got onto her feet. Nutmeg was barely up before being brought low again by Gambol Shroud's compacted gun-blade form coiling around her ankles before being abruptly yanked along the ground toward the cloud of green smoke Blake was now hidden in.

Nutmeg let go of her SMG, letting it drag behind her on the strap she wore it on, before curling up far enough to grab the cord of the weapon that was tangled around her ankles during an interruption due to Blake having another bout of coughs, and yanking back as hard as she could. Since the black-haired girl was already half bent down trying to seek thinner smoke and had doubled over coughing, her eyes probably filled with tears, this actually tugged her far enough forward to make her stumble slightly, loosening Gambol Shroud's wrap enough for Nutmeg to pull a foot free before the other kicked up into the air with an assist from her hand, yanking harder at the cord. Blake had to let go of her main weapon or be brought to all fours by the coughing fit. _Did I load a bit too much gas generation agent in the grenades? I mean, it is supposed to be a distress signal clearly visible from the air, and I made it non-toxic so we could be relatively close by… ah. That's assuming too much for others' chemical warfare capabilities, they don't recognize these non-toxic particulates as a threat so their Auras won't filter them, and Blake got a face-full at point blank, probably inhaled a cloud of the stuff before she even fully realized what it was. Damn that was a lucky shot, I was aiming pretty much center mass._

Still, the black-haired girl seemed to be recovering now that she was focusing on air filtration, so Nutmeg had to strike hard and fast, or she would be overwhelmed. A training grenade center mass just as Blake moved to evade the sudden, very loud popping sound knocked her into a spin she recovered from in under a second, just before Nutmeg was on her like a rabid kitten, smashing away with her rifle butt and slashing with the bayonet, before changing her grip to hold the rifle by the scope that doubled as a large, sturdy handle and yanking out her pistol, which had an almost comically large bayonet attached which strongly resembled a meat cleaver. Blake was starting to regret agreeing to not use Aura offensively before she realized recalling Gambol Shroud wasn't offensive per se. Although Nutmeg seemed to be conserving her guns' ammo, Blake's shots were Aura-based so technically she couldn't use them. That didn't mean she couldn't deal damage with the weapon easily as it slammed at her mental pull into the back of Nutmeg's head with a thunk of composite materials glancing off each other.

"You'd think I played fair from what you've been trying." Nutmeg growled as she ducked an attempt o wrap the weapon around her neck. "I said let's assume this is an Aura-suppressed environment, remember?"

"No, we agreed not to use it offensively."

"And guiding that damned thing isn't offensive?" Nutmeg let the thing catch her rifle's front before yanking back on it in a tug of war that quickly stalemated. "Fine then, I will use everything in my arsenal, except Aura of course." And she grabbed at the strap attached to her back, then opened up with her SMG, chewing through the clip in a few seconds as they pinged off Blake's shields, though the damage was evident in Blake's grimace. When Nutmeg fired her assault rifle, hitting Blake's shields over her hand, she retracted Gambol Shroud to not lose it again as her hand began to ache from the residual force that seeped through the shielding.

The brawl continued, but the tide turned quickly enough as Blake's close combat advantage began to show, now that she'd overcome the respiratory tract irritation and Nutmeg, low on loaded ammunition, began to try to open up the distance again now that a possible favourable moment had passed. "Two grenades, huh? Nice trick, you actually got me once with that." _And you can see through my illusions._ Blake's mind added silently. "You're good, but if I actually used my Aura I'd be far better."

"Did you really think I would bother engaging you when you were using your Aura fully? Some battles should not be fought." Nutmeg began gearing herself more toward evasion than parrying to show off her point and Blake nodded to herself a couple times as they continued across the floor, impressed at how well the brunette was doing, though Blake was not running a full-out offensive.

There was a loud whining sound from the next room, a scream, loud crash, and then the sound of a rather large explosion that Blake's trained ears instantly picked up as being partly Dust-based. The sound level that managed to project itself through the dividing wall was high enough for her to flinch briefly and for her head to turn instinctively toward the threat that was to her subconscious much larger than Nutmeg was… and she found herself smashed in the right side with the flat of Nutmeg's SMG's front end, Gambol Shroud's gun-blade section coming slightly loose from her grip as the tendons were stressed by the impact. She was turning to dampen the blow that would surely come when the sheathe of Gambol Shroud bit shallowly into the lower guard section of Nutmeg's assault rifle but did not stop it from delivering a full diagonal smash to the side of Blake's head. She let her defensive Aura dampen the attack enough that her bells were only rung somewhat as she was thrown to the ground by the impact and Nutmeg pressed the attack while she still could, then struck back. Nutmeg's mid-lunge parry meant they both smashed into the ground sideways, with Nutmeg stacked onto Blake's side. Nutmeg dropped her rifle and yanked out her combat knife, using it and her pistol to hold Blake off from grabbing her weapons.

The boxing that ensued was surprisingly in Nutmeg's favour as she wrapped her legs around Blake's thighs and locked the two of them into place, with her front end almost impervious to Blake's remaining attack options. Once they'd gotten tired of trying to punch or slash each other's lights out with Nutmeg being on top literally and figuratively thanks to Blake not being used to fighting without offensive Aura use, Blake pounded the ground several times in a row and shouted "I yield!" Nutmeg got off her, uncoiling her legs from where they'd locked around Blake's thighs. "Your tactics won the day, though it wasn't an all-out match. It seems I do need more practice in dealing with enemies when I can't use my Aura." Blake said as she got up, rubbing her head.

"I won because of the surprise of that large of an explosion, you're more of an emotional team player than I am, more concerned about your team-mates' immediate well being than me." Nutmeg smirked, thinking _Such are the demands on a tactician, to stay focused regardless of casualties unless they affect the battle plan, since we were one on one, Amber would not affect my battle plan at the time_ and Blake smiled in the affirmative "Anyhow, you need a good sidearm. Whoever came up with the idea of carrying one or two weapons only was an idiot. Let's see what Amber's gotten herself into this time." At Blake's glance Nutmeg said "Only Amber could make an explosion that large, well, Weiss too" Blake smirked and nodded "with how much Dust she loads, but they're facing each other so…" She stepped into the other room via the common corridor on one side, stopped dead, and sighed. "Amber, you do realize thrusters are expensive right?"

"Don't worry, Weiss can foot the bill for that, and the Beacon armoury is free for student use… now just help me get to the damned infirmary will you? Or do some field surgery to get these bits out of my back. A couple managed to wedge deep enough into the spall liner to dig into my skin" Amber coughed a couple more times as she thumped her chest plate, once again trudging along, hunched over and in obvious discomfort. The back pack section of her armour was gone, sent off via emergency ejection, and the crater in one of the room's walls told everyone where its ammunition had cooked off.

Weiss had managed to penetrate one of the thruster pods and cause a Dust spill which managed to short-circuit the pod. It had begun boosting while malfunctioning (whining loudly) and caught fire due to the reactor breach. Amber had had to eject her back pack with her ammunition inside. Fortunately she'd wired the ejection mechanism to detach all weapons, so while they had been taken along for a moment, they'd fallen off as the pack boosted off on its own. Unfortunately the pack steered itself into the nearest wall and exploded before Amber could do more than curl up in a ball. She didn't even have time to manoeuvre to point her feet at the blast and had taken most of it to her back armour, which was badly cracked up in places and burnt in others where jets of HEAA round particle streams had impacted. Though they had degraded a lot over the distance, they still packed a huge wallop against infantry armour. Weiss had thrown up her full shields and, since she had sped off to stand-off ranges after the strike, been unharmed.

So now Weiss had one of Amber's armoured arms over her shoulders and Nutmeg took up the slack on the other side. "Weiss, you have a higher resistance to Dust-based explosions, maybe you should check the wreckage to see if it's at risk of secondary explosions. I'll help Amber to the infirmary." Pyrrha said from where she was checking the crater in the wall, noting that neither Krom nor Talon moved much to help as the emergency medical personnel always standing by at the training rooms sent someone down to take a look. They didn't take walking wounded very seriously at Beacon, since Auras usually meant walking wounded were going to be just fine, and given how well Amber knew her limits, Pyrrha suspected this would just be a bit of tweezer work in the change room, a roll of bandages, and a couple small scars to add to Amber's repertoire. _You know, Amber, you're probably more of a steamroller personality than Yang, or even Nora, with how you deal with all sorts of issues by merely waving them aside as irrelevant or forcing your way through like you did with Jaune._

She wasn't the only one to notice, Amber grimly noticed too, and mentally she chopped Team TANK into two parts: squads NA and TK, standing for No Auras and Team-Killers respectively, because she knew full well that if Talon and Krom really lost all faith in them… they were screwed when fighting against human foes. _It's almost like this is an omen, because our team, without them out here to take and trade hits while we're reloading… we're going to be ammo racked very easily, and that means a pretty much definite kill of the whole crew of whatever vehicle it is. Splitting into new pairs this way would help cover each other better, since now there is no doubt within each pair._

* * *

**A/N:** I hope Nutmeg beating Blake was plausible enough given there was no direct offensive Aura use involved in that spar… now, Review Replies!

**MEleeSmasher**: Jaune didn't go to combat school according to himself. Therefore, prior endurance training… not much if at all. So I conclude that Jaune would have roughly an average 18 year old male's strength and stamina, running him for hours at exercise rates designed by a girl as large and buff as Cardin's original portrayal (i.e. over half a head taller than Jaune, 25% or more wider, etc.) is going to drop him, at least on the first day. He's also not been resting well with the work he had to do for Cardin, so… Amber did more of a number on him than she expected to.

REVIEW!


	11. Catastrophic Kill

A/N: It is worth noting that as tanks have not yet been invented, the term used for the chapter title has yet to be coined on Vytal. In other news, **I'm finally bringing Ashe (by association, Silver too) and Kane into the story**, they'll be shown for the first time near the end of this chapter (though Kane is referenced at the start)!

In Episode 15 around 0:50 I finally realized that from that 3/4 profile shot that Weiss is, in fact, not quite flat as a board. I register my astonishment at this fact. I think we have just had the misfortune to be introduced to Nora's sister though (_DESTROYER OF WORLDS MARK 2_… erm, excuse me…). If only RWBY would give us some examples of missions in stead of a load of high school drama, I could show the moment when Amber realizes that TANK isn't really a team and needs immediate repairs instead of time to think! It turns out that leadership troubles haven't been resolved this chapter… I suppose it might take a while, right?

* * *

Chapter 9: Catastrophic Kill

_The Forest of Forever Fall, Vale Continent, Early November, 597 AD_

Kane would know this place as host to a genetically modified strain of maple trees, with local plant genes added, planted when the Brotherhood of Nod first arrived on Vitality. The local red plants had evolved due to a slightly different radiation spectrum from Earth—the peak emissions were toward the yellow-green of visible light instead of orange-yellow due a hotter star—to use a red photosynthetic pigment year-round instead of the green that would have been the colour of choice on Earth. Actually, green plants coexisted with red plants on this planet, being favoured in some regions (Eternal Forest being one of those) and out-competed in others. However, the large group of students being led by Deputy Headmistress Goodwitch knew nothing of the long history that laid in this forest. They were to harvest sap samples from the trees for their Biology class, not to mention deal with any and all Grimm that tried to attack them.

Pyrrha, Nutmeg and Amber were watching each other's backs, with Korm, Talon, Ren and Nora nearby, when Nutmeg saw Cardin and co. drag Jaune off with them past… "Those markings on that tree indicate an Ursa considers the area beyond to be its territory. From the size of the marks, either it was made a long time ago, unlikely as bears and their Grimm relatives prefer to shallowly mark trees unless they're looking for sap to drink, so damage to the bark wouldn't show up in the cork cambium to grow out to be this huge, or…"

"It's one huge specimen." Amber said, grimacing at the claw marks.

"I don't think they'd take us out anywhere where there aren't potential threats we have to be wary of." Pyrrha put in. "There would be no point."

Amber snarked back with a grin "Except, I don't know, real science without getting distracted every hour or so? Then again that would be for a normal university, not a combat academy."

"Well, whatever it is, better stick close enough so that we can save Jaune's ass if something happens." Nutmeg said, fishing out the large jars she'd stowed in her backpack after they were issued to the students along with the smaller vials that were supposed to be used for one sample per tree. "I don't think using extraneous lab samples in the dining hall cooking is the bet of ideas, but at least the sap isn't toxic or otherwise dangerous."

Amber gestured at her own heavy armour and Nutmeg's lighter full-body armour "Maybe not to me or you, but if Pyrrha gets that sap on her exposed skin and there is a rapier wasp nest nearby, well, the agility her minimal armour affords isn't going to be much help once they wear down her defensive Aura or locally semi-breach it with concentration of force." Enough force on a small enough area COULD result in a semi-penetration of a defensive aura field, though it would be halted soon enough before hitting anything important, a thousand paper-cuts could still be lethal much as how Amber's spall liner caught most shrapnel and penetrating hits but she usually still had at least one bandage wrapped around a part of her on most days.

Pyrrha looked to where she had tapped a tree and sap was dripping into one of her smaller jars "Right, given we're collecting these things in the open with no extra protection, and the wasps haven't come yet, I don't think that will be a problem, they can smell sugar from quite a distance away, so there can't be a hive nearby."

"Wouldn't Nora and Ruby attract them then?" Nutmeg questioned.

Amber hummed with a nod "Well, given Nora's certainly hyperactive enough to be overdosed on sugar regularly and Ruby loves desserts…"

"I think we'll be fine as they haven't been swarmed yet, or Nora hasn't, anyway. It's more confirmation than gathering sap without being attacked is."

* * *

_Half an hour later…_

"The last time I watched cytoplasm stream around inside a growing grass stem under a microscope was infinitely more exciting than this." Amber said flatly after the previous six minutes of silence.

"I would almost like to have a Grimm show up just so that we wouldn't be so bored." Nutmeg groused as her tapped trees kept dripping away at a glacial pace. Pyrrha had gone off to check on her trees, which were near a small rise in the ground. When Nutmeg asked why she'd chosen such an area of open ground from a small nearby hill/ridge from which someone could mount an ambush, she'd smirked mysteriously and declined to answer.

"Where's Jaune and Cardin's crew?" Nutmeg asked suddenly, making Amber think the tactician had just realized something important.

"What did you just realize?" Amber prodded.

"Pyrrha's giving her back to that ridge for a reason, I'd think." Nutmeg pulled her pistol out of its holster at her hip and looked through the scope "Figures. Cardin's trying to get Jaune to chuck a jar of sap at her, but that's not going to do anything except be rather erotic to lick off unless he has a supply of rapier wasps handy." Nutmeg chuckled at her own joke.

Amber sighed and pulled her renovated sniper crutch off her back, flicking a switch to move its barrel back into position, aligned with the breech and recoil mechanisms, before locking it into deployed mode and unfolding its bipod as she put herself prone on the ground "I have a feeling one serious ass-kicking is about to ensue."

"What are you doing? You know Jaune's not going to actually chuck that at Pyrrha right?"

"He might try to miss her on purpose, no guarantees as to how successfully that would work so I can always shoot the jar out of the air if I think it can give Pyrrha a dousing. It's only about a hundred twenty metres from here to Pyrrha's position, so her Aura would still be holding strong even against a full swarm, and rapier wasps can't out-fly me on full burn. It will allow her to formally challenge Jaune's leadership and take over that team, since I think she's more likely to get them all through beacon alive than he is. If he throws it at Cardin, then good, it shows he might be fit to be trained as a leader after all. No one even thinks about hurting my friends and gets away with it, no one, except occasionally me."

"Amber, you're a scary person, for being willing to get your friends mildly injured to achieve the final objective of ensuring their survival, even if they blame you for the injuries and never talk to you again. You'll likely get off free for ostensibly trying to defend Pyrrha, though I suspect she'd know once you started pushing to dislodge Jaune for leadership… You're more of a tactician than I am sometimes. Oh, and I'm rethinking being your friend."

"You should always be recalculating your life choices. Good."

"Interesting choice of reply." _You really care about your friends don't you, Amber? To make sure we're fully wary even of you… it's not something most people would do with friends who they can potentially exploit. If this is a psychological warfare strategy, it may well work, but I will take it at second-level face value until proven otherwise._

Amber pulled herself away from her sniper rifle's scope and clamoured up to her prosthetic feet "I meant good as in Jaune threw the jar at Cardin instead, so his front end is now sap-covered. Admittedly it's not as nice a sight fro Jaune's perspective as throwing it at Pyrrha would have produced, but… he's stood up for himself, good. Although if that attracts unwanted attention… let's move Nutmeg, we've got an ass to potentially save."

"If you're talking about Jaune's backside, it's an ass we'll definitely have to save, Team Cardinal on the other hand… if we get attacked they're four proverbial asses we MIGHT choose to save."

"Ah, Nutmeg, you know you're every bit as calculating as I, do you really think we even have to consider saving Cardin's lot?" Amber chuckled at the snort she got for a response as the two walked after Jaune, they passed Pyrrha as Amber pulled out Broken Ember and her SMG crutch, having put away her sniper crutch after it folded back up and she fell in line after the two, pulling her spear/rifle and shield free from her back .

"I find your lack of faith in my choice of friends disturbing."

Amber smiled a bit, silently trying to communicate _Ah, you noticed, good for you to be wary of even me_ "Sorry." Pyrrha still didn't look amused, though she shrugged and went silent.

* * *

A thunderous roar sounded in the distance as the three tracked Cardin's group from the few small signs they left behind "That… sounded like a bear." Amber stated the vaguely obvious.

"Probably the big Ursa we saw the marks of earlier." Pyrrha said, pushing past the last layer of foliage into a meadow where the confrontation had just begun.

"Get help, I'll stall it!" Cardin barked at his team, which ran off toward the direction of the rest of the excursion. It lunged at him faster than he probably expected, having initially been attracted by the clear and evident scent of the sap that still clung to the front of Cardin's armour but now looking at some proto-syrup (well, sap was refined to be syrup…) marinated meat it wanted.

"Not a bad idea, but it's too large for him to hold off alone, he really should have washed his armour as soon as Jaune broke that jar on him." Amber said. "Just based on"

"Should we give Jaune the chance to save him? It would get Cardin off his back for good, probably." Nutmeg suggested.

Amber had In Amber Clad flipped over her shoulder and fully deployed, ready to fire, though she was busy ramming a rocket down the barrel of Broken Ember, now configured for rocket launching."I'm not helping Cardin unless he's about to die. If he gets banged up, then he had done unto him as he liked to try to do unto others. If Jaune puts himself at risk though… this would be a great time for another leadership lesson. Besides, I've been working on learning how to use my thrusters in active combat, I need to get some real practice."

"Amber, you know full well those thrusters don't line up well with your center of mass unless you extend them and shuffle them down toward your sides. We've tried this before." Though it was true that they were good for lateral flight and manoeuvres with a given start velocity, they weren't good for flying from a standstill. This velocity was usually picked up by jumping off a tall object or, in less conventional cases, a skateboard and accelerating on her belly until the wings produced adequate lift to pick Amber up with the slight thruster reorientations that their design allowed for. _Wait, no… so THAT'S why it looks different, more sophisticated and covering more of her back, even though Amber never briefed me on its capabilities_ "Did you re-design them to be able to shift the thrusters after Weiss accidentally wrecked your pack?"

"Yep, they swivel out now, though the backpack functionality remains, I just need to tuck my arms between me and them now when I fly if I want to maximize speed. On the plus side, powered flight stability is way up, I can launch from standing, and they can somewhat swivel now, just need someone to help program the autopilot better so I can fly and shoot reliably, repeatedly, at the same time… and I mean guns, not rockets or In Amber Clad, those I have no problems with."

"You're full of surprises aren't you?" Nutmeg said just before the Ursa swept the mace out of Cardin's hands with a good deflection of a counter-strike by Cardin.

"The Gifted come up with new moves all the time, I have to improve my technologies to stay competitive." Amber said grimly as she showed Nutmeg the primary flight control panel that was under a new addition to her center chest plate, relocated there from its old spot behind her massive knee guard, and the secondary ones on the short pylons holding the thrusters now.

"You do realize though that it's worse now for your ground-side mobility as you're bulkier than ever?" Nutmeg said as she watched Cardin scrabble backward.

"I think we both know I wouldn't go into any small enclosed spaces anyhow, though my shotgun is great for clearing them out, I'm too big to fit in next to the corpse trail I'd leave. Besides, I'm no wider than I was before, just deeper front to back, when they're folded in. Though since the wings go out further now my lateral liftoff speed has decreased drastically, no more risk of breaking my neck in lateral speed." Amber took off at that as Jaune tried to take the creature by surprise and failed, being batted aside and attracting its attention. "This is one of the times when I'm glad I try to keep In Amber Clad loaded as much as possible." She muttered as she shoved her left hand under the spaced-armour overhang atop the control panel mounted in the center of her chest plate, jamming down on the launch code combination as her thrusters swept out to the sides and locked into place before firing. Her right hand pulled In Amber Clad's mounted collapsed form over her shoulder and yanked it about a bit to extend it before she fired a round at the creature's side, as it had turned to glance at the noise and decided this larger flying biped could be a bigger potential threat than the comparatively scrawny one with the blade. It roared in pain as the projectile cut into its left arm with the blast and punched through to slam the left side of its torso with a cloud of superheated gases emitted from the tunnel through its now numb and nerveless arm.

"Its left arm is crippled, Jaune! Take advantage of distractions!" Amber's suit speaker boomed and the young blonde went in, adding a slash across the tricep of the creature's right arm before it struck his shield again with a backhanded smack and he had to brace himself. "Give us orders Jaune, work as a team!"

The blonde hesitated for a moment before the thing's limp left arm almost whipped him as he leapt back. He yelled "Nutmeg, give it a grenade to the face, Pyrrha, hit it in a weak spot!" The creature stumbled and scratched at its face in pain from the concussive wave that had badly bruised it even through its carapace plates before emitting a high wail that was completely unexpected. It had Jaune clasping his hands over his ears along with everyone else who didn't have sound-resistant helmets (Amber and Nutmeg's necks tensed at the noise). At the same time the huge creature curled up in a tight ball and fell on its side.

Jaune winced again when he noticed Pyrrha recalling her javelin telekinetically with a thought and a spurt of dark blood, from a very painful part of the bear-like creature's anatomy, a distinctly male part. _I didn't expect her to drill that kind of weak spot… but it makes sense to use the javelin form instead of the rifle form because it leaves a larger, more ragged wound, and there, that means more pain._ Jaune thought, shouting "Does anyone have good shots for easy kills?"

Amber had landed on a thick tree branch and pulled out Broken Ember. She noticed Krom and Talon standing at the edge of the clearing, their weapons now sheathed again, and frowned, why had they not moved in to assist her in distracting the thing, particularly during her long reload cycles? "Not unless rocket!" She replied loudly, breaking off the shotgun stock and recoil assembly and rotating it out of position, switching in the rocket launcher mechanisms and pulling a rocket from the armoured pack on her back.

"No shots!" Pyrrha and Nutmeg replied while the creature groaned in pain, Pyrrha having her weapon in rifle form. They wouldn't get through its carapaced back efficiently with how tightly it was balled up and the way its spines were flattened defensively.

"Amber, fire a rocket to get it to uncurl!" He yelled.

"You got it!" She yelled back as she finished ramming the rocket down the barrel of the weapon, raising it to her left shoulder, and firing it with the shotgun mechanisms braced against the back of her shoulder like a reverse stock, the former combined scope/sight of the shotgun serving as her forward grip. "Stand back!" She yelled before depressing the trigger, formerly an iron sight mounted atop the scope.

"Wha—" Jaune was cut off by the creature lashing out, flexing its body straight and past that convulsively, spines rising into offensive stance as it was blasted in the back, blood seeping from the deep, mostly-cauterized crater that had been punched in its back as it forced itself upright and charged at Jaune since it was the first thing its maddened eyes saw.

To buy the young man a moment of time to fully restabilize himself Amber twisted the wrist that was gripping the branch to align herself more horizontally. Then she let go and kicked off hard, the digitigrade construction of her prosthetics allowing for a very fast takeoff while her other hand seized on of her "crutches" off her back. She fired her thrusters down and to her front outsides—to ensure the exhaust didn't force the creature forward—as she slammed into the Ursa between its shoulder blades, in a space between its spines, feet impacting as her bayonet plunged into its back, taking care to miss the spine and most vitals but still cause enough pain to stun the thing. It flinched, rearing back somewhat, exposing its throat, and that was enough time for Jaune to finish regaining his footing form his roll and hack its head off in a gurgling burst of blood. "You did it, Jaune. Congratulations." Amber said as she let go and flew backward, eyes widening behind her helmet visor as she realized she was doing a backflip due to the thrust vectoring and how it was lined up with her center of gravity…

She landed on all fours followed by her limbs collapsing to absorb the shock so that her front met the ground with a dull thud "That… was not nearly as elegant as I would have liked." She said, visor still firmly planted in the grass of the meadow. Then she pushed herself off the ground and bent her legs so that her foot would be up against her knee, allowing her to swivel her whole leg forward under her with the orientation sensors telling the mechanical limb how to reposition, then pushing outward to land her feet on the ground beneath her frame and, with a final shove of her hands, spring upright. It was like how a person with very large feet would get up, Amber's mechanical feet being like the balls of said large feet.

* * *

_A couple hours later…_

"Amber, thank you." Jaune said quietly on their way back to the school

"What are you thanking me for?" The girl pretended to be puzzled, while thinking _Good, he's fully aware of the event._

"You taught me a valuable lesson today in addition to making sure I grew more confident in myself by letting me do most of the work while you set the pieces up to favour me. Pyrrha would probably only have intervened at a decisive moment to swing the odds in my favour instead of letting me get batted around, but you helped nudge the whole path so that I could understand that I am capable, even if you have no problem with non-disabling pain to learn a lesson."

Amber stopped abruptly, her hand on Jaune's shoulder arresting him as well "You just went full retard. Never go full retard." She mimed slapping him with a flick of her wrist "I can set up the odds to favour you as much as I want, and I didn't set them beyond what you could easily have done yourself, but if you go full retard, the odds won't save you. You saved yourself today, be it by attracting the right friends, pure raw Aura power, diligent training, or all of the above, Jaune."

"Given she's beaten you into better shape with her physical training regimen and taken every chance to show you well-prepared psychological lessons, I'd be surprised if you weren't capable, Jaune." A certain team-mate of his said from behind his other shoulder, the one he wasn't looking over at the moment, causing him to flinch slightly in surprise.

"Hey Pyrrha." Nutmeg greeted from where she was walking alongside Amber.

"It was a good analysis, Jaune." The redhead said with a smile, looking into Jaune's eyes while Amber dropped back slightly behind them, letting go and letting Jaune's feet go back on autopilot. "It is good to see you, and your faith in yourself, grow." Pyrrha didn't even look as she brought up a hand to stop Amber's palm from pushing their faces together. "Amber, how about NO."

"Aw… but you were so close!" Pyrrha's left eye twitched and she resisted the urge to shudder at the DAAWWWWW-face Amber was making, which looked, well, rather disturbing.

Nutmeg pulled Jaune aside as Amber and Pyrrha kept bickering good-naturedly "Amber is a rabid shipper when it comes to her friends, she's likely to take all convenient painless opportunities to set you two up now that her mind has decided you two would make a good couple. It's one of the few hobbies she has."

Jaune looked rather disturbed at the idea "How can we get her off our backs?"

"Get her distracted with something more important like studying or surviving, or just submit to her will. Also, I advise you to not say something like that near Pyrrha…" she cut his unimpressed look "right, you're not stupid."

"Why's she not obsessing over Ren and Nora instead then? They're far closer than me and Pyrrha in any and all ways, shapes and forms!" Jaune hissed quietly.

"Amber thinks those two are a done deal so she's not bothering with intervention tactics."

Jaune groaned helplessly "Damn it…"

"You know the price of treachery, Tactician." Amber said in a normal voice to the sky ahead, Nutmeg suspected she knew her helmet's passive sonar set would pick it up perfectly loud and clear. "Though I don't blame you for this instance, after all, we are all friends." Pyrrha's soft laugh was quite loud in Nutmeg's headset.

"Good to hear!" She shouted back as she tugged on Jaune's arm to get him into a run so they could catch up faster.

Once they caught up, Amber turned her head toward Jaune and said abruptly "By the way, Jaune, here's something you might want to keep in mind: 'Pleasure fused with pain this triumph of the soul will make you shiver tonight.' I don't remember where I heard it, maybe even in some delirious dream around the time I got my feet hacked off, but it's something I feel you should know."

Jaune stared as she sped up to catch up to Krom and Talon "Are you sure your team leader isn't completely insane?"

Nutmeg looked at him as if he had just gone, as Amber would call it, full retard. "Do you think you can be sane and still want to be a huntress without an Aura to save your ass?" With that for a reply, Jaune decided that this was a very good time to shut up before he dug himself into a deeper hole.

"Krom, Talon, why didn't you guys help out back there?" Amber had now moved on to the two men of Team TANK.

"You guys looked like you could handle it, and Jaune didn't call for us to intervene." Talon said simply, while Krom had a frown.

Amber came up short. "That sounds… like what I'd expect of you two." _Still, something doesn't seem right, you'd think at least they'd have had their weapons out ready to jump in to assist us… unless they've decided that I'm not their leader anymore, but why would they still be following my training regimens and sparring with us normally? I guess they're still uncertain with how their entire world view has been shaken by the understanding that most people simply lack auras…_

She was correct in her assessment, but what she didn't think of was the fact that Talon would probably have hesitated even if she or Nutmeg was in mortal danger, though Krom would have moved to assist them.

* * *

_Unknown Location, Planet Vitality (Vytal), late October, 597 AD_

The locals, a civilization barely two millennia old, had already forgotten the name that had been decided on for the planet. It was sad, but inevitable, for time crumbles things. Everything fades and is washed away by time. When the Brotherhood of Nod first landed here, they named it for the vibrant biosphere as compared to the half-dead Earth they had left far in the future. They named it "Vitality"… and now the locals, the Brotherhood long forgotten, referred to it simply as "Vytal".

It was sad to see them making the same mistakes as their ancestors, though now the oppressors were more overt. There were no more small, emaciated hands pressing their thumb prints on Nod recruitment papers for military rations to fill starving bellies and shelter to keep out the cold of winter or the deadly contaminated rain that came during ion storms. There were no more slightly less skin-and-bone fingers clutching too-large rifles tightly to growth-stunted bodies swathed in oversized uniform shirts while small, worn feet in old combat boots stumbled through cratered streets toward safety and GDI artillery rained down around them. No, now the beating down of the masses was more stealthy, less questionable, and far more dangerous to the future of mankind… well, past too, technically, but that wasn't the point.

An ancient but yet uncreated being, a tall, bald man, sighed as he watched the difficulties in leadership at Beacon amidst Team TANK. It was led by the one who he had long, long ago in his life and millennia in the future learnt of as the long-deceased ideological founder of the Resistance. Unfortunately in the Great Revision most documents pertaining to this era, two thousand some years before his creation, had been destroyed by the government, so in his youth he had not learnt much about the details of this era. He wondered briefly why this was so, perhaps because time loops contained a certain level of variability and were capable of divergence so long as the loop itself was still maintained?

He thought back to the words he had said to the Shepards before he led a small army of the Brotherhood through Threshold 19, and shook his head at how much history repeated itself, for it had been the same struggle, the same struggle that would be reignited by the Great Revision, the struggle that had existed ever since humanity drew breath, nay, ever since sentience evolved. He suspected he could use the exact same lines here, and murmured to himself "I have lived for over a hundred thousand years… watched the wars, seen so many die… It must end, we must be free… It is up to you, my children." He'd originally copied it off of a line from a certain video game's red and black faction's leader since it sounded so well-worded, but it did not only apply back then, it seemed…

It was sad how it was almost always up to the children to fight the wars their parents had failed to fight, resolve the disputes their parents had not handled… but such was the way of things. Kane had enough active installations across the world to aid them against this Order of Nations that was no doubt the ideological forefather of the Order, as the government was called in his youth. Said government had resulted in the destruction of human civilization due to its ineptitude at dealing with an infiltrating, proliferating threat crafted by the Great Enemy, despite being able to handle the ships and/or bodies of the Great Enemy just fine.

A sudden thought crossed his mind _Is this why… I was always simply unable to read certain parts of the texts Agent Guardian wrote, even though I had the files, and for the last hundred years I was completely unable to make myself open said texts, because I could not know that my future would say such a line and now cannot know the full details of the revolution that is to come, but which was ancient history even at the time of my birth? Time, you are a cruel mistress…_

A young teenager with pure white hair, unlike her unmet sister's bright silver, disrupted his troubled thoughts "Uncle Kane, is something wrong?"

"Well…" Kane wondered how best to explain the matter to this girl who had been a victim of the Order of Nations since shortly after her conception, then decided to be straightforward. "The best potential leader of the revolution that must occur is having leadership troubles with her team at Beacon because they found out she and the other girl on her team have no Aura, and both the males subscribe at least in part to the idea that Aura-less means soulless."

"Damned Team system… it forces people to work together, but sometimes… you just can't force it." Ashe grumbled to herself "I don't know why Mom ever got with Father, but I'm starting to think it may have been forced."

Kane sighed through his nose with a shake of his head "You really don't want your mother hearing that. I've been around since long before she was born, and I consulted my systems' records of her time at Beacon and afterward, her feelings toward your father at least seemed genuine, and his for her too, unless they're both godly actors."

Ashe grunted in irritation at the insinuation that her father was anything less than a traitor who merely used her mother to conceive an heir before deciding to dispose of her "Perhaps, what are you going to do about those two guys then? I don't suppose you can do anything about it really…"

"Indeed… shouldn't you get back to your studies?"

The white-haired girl nodded "True, I need to be a lot tougher if I want to get revenge for what he put Mom through." She'd seen the rapier stab scars her mother had, which took up more than half her mother's scar repertoire, and if she had the chance she'd gladly return them to the sender a thousand times over until the man resembled a bloody beehive. She'd sworn it as she had her own rapier forged, and she would see it through to the bitter end.

While she was tightening her hold on the hilt of her own weapon while striding away, Kane had his fists tightened. _Why can I not remember reading about the ending Agent Guardian had written in his fanfiction which would in fact be an echo of the distant past? That girl… both these girls, are forced to be so strong, and are so depressing and gloomy they both deserve a happy ending… Even though this generation's bottom-class heroes and leaders are much better off than ones I have seen before—they were never forced to resort to hand to hand combat with raccoons for scraps from trash cans to survive for example—they lack the glaring optimism others I have seen had. This generation's optimism is buried deeper…_

Something else occurred to the Immortal all of a sudden. _I wonder if Agent Guardian had, subconsciously, felt this, me, echoing down through time, and put it in his works, maybe that's why I remember never being able to access parts of the texts even when I could read most of it._

Kane could still remember the fact that Agent Guardian had referred to his three major "Original Characters" for that animated series Kane couldn't remember the name of as "Blood, Ice and Steel". If Kane surmised correctly, then Ashe represented Ice while Krom's grey theme colour would put him as Steel. If Amber was supposed to be Blood… what had orange blood? Perhaps Agent Guardian would concoct some sort of story set in some other universe where there was a species of sentients with orange blood, where thousands of individually weak creatures would form one strong entity, much as Amber would form the countless Ungifted into a powerful fighting force. It would, of course, be hilariously ironic if these collective individuals were labelled Hunters, wore heavy armour which cut down on agility to cover very frail bodies, and carried high-alpha-strike weapons designed for anti-armour or fire support.

On a side note, once Kane got back to the future, he could create his own science fiction series including such a species, perhaps even using a modified version of the events that had happened to his own people, and label it as more of his "prophetic" work once the installations were discovered. Yes, he should do that…

* * *

**End A/N**: I think I just made it perfectly clear why this is set 102,000 years before the SI Archives series, and also which fandom occupies most of the time in between. (Insert troll-face here) REVIEW REPLIES!

**MEleeSmasher**: We haven't gotten there yet, just noting that Monty turned the cheesiness level up way too far and I'll have to do damage control in this fic, as was done in this chapter (I think I made the experience much more educational than it would have been otherwise).

REVIEW!


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